The short answer: Six investors. Eleven term sheets. ₱60M of soft commitments inked by the closing ceremony of Impact Hub Manila’s AI for Good 2026 Hackathon. The hackathon is no longer a starting line for Filipino frontier-tech founders — it is the deal room.
For most of the last decade, the conventional path for a Filipino founder went something like this: build for two years, get a small grant, struggle to access capital, eventually relocate the holdco to Singapore. In 2026 something has shifted. The capital is now showing up in Manila, and it is showing up early — sometimes 48 hours after a team writes its first commit.
The clearest signal came at AI for Good 2026, our flagship responsible-AI hackathon held April 17–19. By the closing dinner, six investor partners had circulated eleven term sheets across the cohort. By the following Monday, three of those term sheets had progressed to signed SAFEs.
What investors are actually buying
The simple version: they are not buying decks. They are buying a working artifact and a team that shipped it under stress in 48 hours. That single signal — can these people execute — turns out to be a remarkably strong filter, and it is one that decks notoriously cannot reproduce.
- 83% of the term sheets circulated were on teams whose demo ran on a real device, not a mockup.
- Median check size: $250,000 (~₱14M) for a SAFE at a $4M–$6M post.
- Target ownership: 5–7%.
- Time from first conversation to soft commit: under 36 hours in three of eleven cases.
Who is writing checks in the Philippines in 2026
The investor map has changed materially. Five years ago, Filipino frontier-tech ventures had perhaps three credible domestic checks available at seed. In 2026 we count seventeen active funds across the country, with three new arrivals in the last twelve months alone:
Domestic seed and pre-seed funds
A growing roster of Manila and Cebu-based funds writing $50K–$500K checks. Several are spinouts of family offices that traditionally invested in property and BPO — now diversifying into tech with explicit climate and AI mandates.
Regional Southeast Asian funds with PH offices
Singapore and KL-based partners with active dealflow desks in BGC. The change since 2024: they now lead, not follow. Five regional partners closed lead positions in PH-headquartered companies in Q1 2026.
Multilateral and DFI capital
The Asian Development Bank’s Action for Climate Today fund, IFC’s Startup Catalyst, and a JICA program for resilience tech are all writing concessional capital into Filipino ventures. ADB has earmarked ₱420M specifically for ventures from Impact Hub Manila programs.
Corporate strategics
Smart, PLDT, Ayala, SM, Aboitiz, JG Summit, Globe’s 917Ventures — all running active CVC programs with disclosed mandates around climate, AI, and inclusive finance. Strategic checks now come earlier than they used to.
“What changed is the realization that you do not need to be a Singapore Pte. Ltd. to take regional capital anymore. The PH holdco works. The legal infrastructure caught up. Once that became clear, the capital followed.”
— David Reyes, founding partner of a BGC-based seed fund
The mechanics of a hackathon raise
How does ₱60M get committed in 48 hours? The honest answer is that the hackathon is the visible tip of a longer process. Three structural choices Impact Hub Manila has made over the last 18 months drive the speed:
- Investor partners get full demo access in real time. They are not pitched at the end. They watch the build, ask questions on Slack, sit beside the teams during dry runs.
- Standardized SAFE templates. We co-developed a one-page Philippine SAFE template with two leading law firms. Adoption is now around 60% of cohort raises and growing.
- Pre-vetted deal room. Cap tables, founders’ agreements, IP assignments, KYB packets — all prepared inside our INCUBATE program before the hackathon. When an investor wants to move, the data room is already there.
What founders should know if they are raising in 2026
Three observations from a Hub working with founders every week:
- Demos beat decks at seed. If you can ship a working thing, ship it. The deck still matters — but it is a follow-up artifact, not a leading one.
- The PH holdco is now defensible. The conversation about flipping to a Singapore Pte. Ltd. is no longer automatic. Many regional funds now explicitly prefer to invest into the PH holdco.
- Climate, AI, and inclusive finance get priced differently. If your venture maps cleanly to one of these three theses with measurable outcomes, expect a better term sheet than a generic SaaS at the same revenue.
The frontier tech that is getting funded
What is actually drawing capital? Five categories dominate the 2026 Q1 deal flow:
- Edge AI and embedded ML for offline-first deployments.
- Climate adaptation infrastructure: early warning, parametric insurance, microgrid orchestration.
- Health AI with on-device privacy guarantees, especially mental health and primary-care triage.
- Agritech for smallholders — disease diagnosis, market access, cold chain.
- Circular economy infrastructure tied to Extended Producer Responsibility compliance.
What's next
The next investor breakfast is May 25, 2026, in BGC, alongside the Open House Cebu tour. INCUBATE 2027 applications open in September; founders raising in the ₱5M–₱25M range are encouraged to apply.
For weekly updates from the Filipino capital beat, subscribe via our news page. Investors interested in joining the AI for Good 2027 partner roster can reach out via the contact form.