Close to USD 600 million of eFishery’s reported revenue did not exist. The Indonesian agritech unicorn had raised more than USD 294 million from twenty-eight institutional investors and cleared every layer of audit and diligence between itself and its capital. The fraud is the visible surface of a deeper absence: a market with seventeen unicorns and no disclosure regime for the private companies that hold most of its value.

Ground Truth: Indonesia | Saint Clair Market Intelligence | 25 May 2026

Based on published reporting by Kiroyan Partners, SSEK, Asian Legal Business, The Jakarta Post and The Diplomat, with regulatory context from the US Department of State. Saint Clair’s analysis follows.

In December 2024, a whistleblower’s complaint reached a board member of eFishery, an Indonesian agritech company that had reached a USD 1.4 billion valuation in 2023. The investigation that followed found that the company had reported USD 752 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2024. Roughly USD 150 million of that figure was real. eFishery had recorded a USD 16 million profit while losing USD 35.4 million. Close to USD 600 million of its reported business did not exist.

eFishery had raised more than USD 294 million from twenty-eight institutional investors, among them SoftBank and Temasek. Its accounts had passed external audit. It had cleared the diligence of some of the most experienced venture investors operating in Asia. Indonesia’s largest startup fraud was also one of its most thoroughly examined companies.

The eFishery story is compelling on its own terms, and that is the risk in telling it. Read as a scandal, it offers outrage and little that lasts. Read as evidence, it points somewhere more useful: a market that has produced seventeen unicorns and a digital economy approaching USD 100 billion has built no disclosure regime for the private companies that carry most of its value. The fraud is the symptom. The absence is the subject.

The Scale of the Fraud

For most of its life, eFishery was the kind of company a frontier market hopes to produce. Founded in 2013, it built automated feeders for fish and shrimp farmers, then added distribution and credit, assembling an end-to-end platform around an industry that employs millions of Indonesians. Its mission read well: technology in the service of rural smallholders. In 2023 a USD 200 million Series D round lifted its valuation to USD 1.4 billion and gave Indonesia its first aquaculture-technology unicorn.

The mission was also the cover. A story about feed efficiency and farmer livelihoods made eFishery a difficult company to doubt. It had raised a USD 90 million round in early 2022, at the depth of the regional funding winter, when most Indonesian startups were cutting headcount and struggling to close. A company performing that well at that moment earned admiration ahead of scrutiny. The investors who backed it were experienced and well resourced, and they were doing what the market rewarded.

The reckoning was quick. The board removed both co-founders in December 2024 and installed interim leadership. By March 2025 the former chief executive had admitted to falsifying financial data, with roughly USD 300 million in investor funds unaccounted for; Indonesian police detained him and two former executives in August. The figures at the centre of the case are now investigative record: revenue overstated by a factor of five, a reported profit that masked a material loss, a unicorn valuation resting on transactions that were largely invented.

The Mechanics That Made It Possible

The thoroughness of the deception is what makes the eFishery case instructive. The fraud was a parallel version of the company, built and maintained for years.

Published accounts of the investigation trace it to 2018. From that point eFishery kept two sets of financial reports, one for internal use and one for investors, and the gap between them widened as the company raised more capital. To make the investor-facing accounts cohere, eFishery needed revenue it did not have, so it manufactured revenue. A network of companies indirectly owned by the founder generated forged invoices and contracts and moved money in circles, a practice known as round-tripping, until the paper trail showed sales that had never occurred. Those same companies were presented to investors as eFishery’s customers, which made the fraud a related-party structure as well as an accounting one.

The fabrication reached past the books into operations. eFishery reported 400,000 fish feeders deployed across Indonesia. Twenty-four thousand existed. The fictitious revenue had fictitious infrastructure beneath it, sized to match. Published reporting on the case states that eFishery presented this fabricated documentation to its external auditors and to the diligence teams of its investors. Investors interviewed a former finance executive and recorded no concern. They engaged surveyors to confirm the company’s market position.

Each of those checks examined documents, and the documents had been built to pass. Diligence that verifies the paper a company supplies cannot catch a fraud that has manufactured the paper. The one test that would have exposed eFishery, a physical count of the feeders against the claim, sat outside the standard process, because standard process assumes that the operational reality behind audited accounts is real.

The Pattern Underneath

eFishery is the largest case of its kind in Indonesia. It is also the most visible part of a wider pattern.

KoinWorks, a fintech lender, disclosed a fraud at its KoinP2P subsidiary that cost roughly Rp 365 billion, about USD 23 million, and exposed weaknesses in the company’s financial controls. Through 2025 the picture widened further. Corruption probes reached the venture arms of state-owned enterprises, where investigators alleged that investment rules had been breached in funding channelled to a now-defunct agritech company. A former banker quoted in the reporting on eFishery, a person with direct knowledge of the market, said he was aware of at least two other major Indonesian startups that had manipulated their accounts.

The market read the cluster correctly. Indonesian startup funding fell roughly ninety per cent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the eFishery disclosure. Private funding in the first half of 2025 came in below USD 80 million, against around USD 200 million in the same period of 2024. Some investment firms moved capital toward Vietnam and the Philippines; others stepped back from technology altogether.

The more durable change is in how diligence is done. Roderick Purwana, managing partner at the venture firm East Ventures, told The Jakarta Post in December 2025 that investor risk appetite remained intact but the bar had risen, and that diligence had become “deeper and more forensic”. Financial controls, revenue quality, related-party exposure and cash discipline are now examined earlier in a deal. Capital is still available; it is released more slowly and questioned more closely. For a market that had priced governance as a procedural cost, that is a structural correction, and a healthy one.

The Structural Void

The post-mortems on eFishery converge on weak governance and lax oversight. That diagnosis is correct, and it stops one level short of the structural point.

eFishery was a private company, and in Indonesia a private company carries no obligation to publish audited financial statements, whatever the capital it holds or the number of institutions exposed to it. A firm valued at USD 1.4 billion and funded by twenty-eight investors sat under the same disclosure regime as a corner shop. The investor-facing accounts were the only accounts most stakeholders ever saw, and those were the accounts the company itself controlled. Public-market reporting standards exist precisely to take that control away from the company and hand it to an independent regime. Indonesia has built no equivalent for late-stage private firms, and most of the value in its startup sector now sits inside exactly those firms.

The gap is legal, which means it can be closed. SSEK, the Indonesian law firm, set out the remedy in concrete terms after the case broke: mandatory financial disclosure for companies above a certain scale, and clearer obligations to disclose conflicts of interest where executives hold ownership stakes in related companies. That second point describes the eFishery round-tripping structure exactly. The instrument that would have made the fraud visible is a disclosure rule Indonesia has not yet written.

The institution that might have supplied a counterweight has moved the other way. The Corruption Eradication Commission, Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency, had its independence reduced by a 2019 law that limited its ability to investigate without political interference; investigations and prosecutions fell, and criminal-code revisions taking effect in 2026 reduce the penalties for corruption. Across the same decade in which Indonesia produced seventeen unicorns, the architecture that polices financial misconduct was weakened. The disclosure void and the supervisory gap are structural features of this market.

There is a second cost, and it is the one the headline figures miss. The capital already lost in eFishery is finite and largely written down. The capital that now routes around Indonesia is open-ended. Analysing the case, Kiroyan Partners warned that the erosion of trust could deter foreign investors, major banking institutions in particular, from treating Indonesia as a destination. A single fraud is a closed event. A reputation for undetectable fraud is a recurring tax on every future allocation, and it is paid by every honest founder in the market.

The Corridor View

Indonesia’s startup sector will keep producing companies worth backing. The scale this series described a week ago is real: 283 million people and a digital economy approaching USD 100 billion. None of that is in question. What the eFishery year changed is the price of trust.

For most of the past decade, the market treated governance as a cost of doing business: a diligence checklist, an audit fee, a box confirmed before the capital moved. eFishery reframed it. In a market without a disclosure regime, governance is the layer the investor has to supply, because the state does not supply it. The firms that can supply it credibly hold an advantage the market has only begun to price.

This is where European institutional capital holds an under-recognised position. European investors carry governance as standard practice: operating-board discipline, independent audit trails, related-party scrutiny, unit-economics rigour applied before the capital commits. In Frankfurt or Amsterdam that is unremarkable, the ordinary cost of managing other people’s money. In post-eFishery Indonesia it is a differentiator, and a durable one, because it cannot be assembled quickly by a competitor who has never built it.

The market is already correcting. Investors have raised the bar, and diligence has become more forensic. Fore Coffee, a tech-enabled chain, completed an initial public offering in April 2025, and one of its backers said plainly that disciplined execution and governance were what made the listing possible. The correction is under way; it is not complete, and it will not complete itself.

The investable insight is straightforward. The capital Indonesia most needs now is capital that arrives with governance already attached. For the European institution with an ASEAN remit, that is the opening.

Sources:

• Rahmad Budi Harto and Beringin Kusuma, “Hard Lessons from eFishery’s Fishy Business,” Kiroyan Partners / Stratsea (30 April 2025). kiroyan-partners.com

• “Could the eFishery Scandal Be a Wake-Up Call for Indonesia’s Startup Ecosystem?”, Asian Legal Business, featuring analysis from SSEK (March 2025).

• Arif Perdana, “eFishery Scandal Exposes Weak Governance in Indonesia’s Tech Start-ups,” The Jakarta Post (31 January 2025). thejakartapost.com

• James Guild, “The Financial Scandal at Indonesian Tech Unicorn eFishery, Explained,” The Diplomat (February 2025). thediplomat.com

• Ruth Dea Juwita, “Indonesia’s Start-up Scandals in 2025 Force Investors to Raise the Bar, Change Playbooks,” The Jakarta Post / Asia News Network (January 2026). asianews.network

• US Department of State, 2025 Investment Climate Statement: Indonesia (2025).

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Saint Clair has an active engagement with frontier Asian startup ecosystems and may have commercial interests in markets discussed. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | saintclair.asia | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | 2026년 5월

한국은 아시아에서 가장 큰 초기 단계 공공 펀딩 시스템을 갖춘 나라 중 하나다. 해마다 수조 원이 이 구조를 거쳐 가지만, 그 성과는 균일하지 않다. 정부 지원을 받은 기업 가운데 5년을 넘기지 못하고 문을 닫는 비중이 높고, 2025년에는 펀딩을 받은 스타트업 수가 줄어든 대신 자본이 소수 기업에 몰렸다. 게다가 스타트업 종사자의 직무 만족도 역시 관련 통계 작성 이래 가장 낮았다. 원인은 펀딩 구조 그 자체에 있으며, 이 구조가 특정한 유형의 창업자를 길러낸다. 한국 시장을 평가하는 유럽과 미국 자본에게는 바로 그 유형을 알아보는 일이 중요하다.

전략적 기질

서울 괴테 인스티튜트에서 일했던 한 독일인 동료에게는 한국인 동료들을 향한 한 가지 의문이 늘 따라다녔다. 몇 분 늦은 사람이 왜 그렇게까지 지나치게 사과하는가. 독일인은 시간을 엄수하기로 유명하다. 그런 그가 보기에도 한국인의 시간 감각은 단순한 정밀함 이상이었다.

이런 관찰은 데이터로도 뒷받침된다. 호프스테더의 불확실성 회피 지수에서 한국은 85점을 받는다. 이 지수의 틀 자체는 지난 20여 년간 비교문화론 학계의 비판을 받아왔지만, 1차 비교의 기준으로는 여전히 유효하다. 미국 46점, 독일 65점, 일본 92점과 비교하면 한국은 상위권에 속한다. 시간 엄수로 이름난 독일조차 한국보다 20점 낮다.

가톨릭대학교 영어영문학과 이창봉 교수는 펜실베이니아대에서 화용론을 공부한 언어학자이자, 한국 사회의 패턴을 글로 풀어온 연구자다. 그는 우리에게 익숙한 여러 현상을 이 하나의 성향으로 설명한다. 위계를 빠르게 정리하려는 본능, 새로운 모임에서 누가 누구인지 신속하게 파악하는 감각, 남들과 같아지려는 충동이 모두 모호함을 견디지 못하는 같은 성향이 다르게 드러난 것이라는 게 그의 분석이다. 같은 성향이 ‘빨리빨리’를 낳았다고도 설명한다. 코로나19 사태 초기, 서구의 보건 시스템이 위원회를 소집하던 사이 한국이 드라이브-스루 진단소를 설계하고 진단키트를 양산하며 추적 인프라를 세웠던 것도 바로 그 순발력 덕분이었다.

불확실성 회피는 전략적 기질이다. 한국 제조업을 정밀함으로 이름나게 만든 대기업 생산 라인을 떠받친 것도 이 기질이고, K-방역을 낳은 것도 같은 본능이다. 한국 아이의 가방은 등 한가운데 가지런히 놓이는데, 미국 아이의 가방은 어깨끈이 비뚤어진 채 옆으로 매달려도 아무도 신경 쓰지 않는다. 그 차이의 일부도 여기서 비롯된다. 그러나 이 기질이 거꾸로 작용하는 영역이 하나 있다. 불확실성이 곧 그 일의 재료가 되는 영역, 바로 스타트업이다.

공공 펀딩 구조

지난 10년간 한국의 공공 스타트업 펀딩 체계는 아시아 최대 수준으로 커졌다. 중소벤처기업부는 예비창업패키지, 초기창업패키지, 도약패키지, TIPS, K-스타트업 그랜드 챌린지(KSGC) 등을 운영하며, 연간 사업비만 조 단위에 이른다. 초기 단계 기업에 투입되는 공공 자본의 규모만 보면, 한국은 세계에서 가장 활발한 후원자 중 하나다.

결과는 사뭇 다른 이야기를 들려준다. 중소벤처기업부의 대표적 예비 단계 지원 사업으로 2019년 정식 시행된 예비창업패키지를 다룬 한국 언론 보도는, 지원 기업의 5년 차 생존율이 낮은 수준에 머물러 있으며 특히 AI·바이오 등 지식서비스 분야의 생존율이 제조업보다 낮다고 짚는다. 2025년 수치는 한결 단단하다. 펀딩을 받은 스타트업 수는 3,136곳으로 9% 줄어든 반면, 기업당 평균 투자 규모는 24% 늘어 31억 2,000만 원에 달했다. 3분기 한 분기에만 단 세 건의 거래가 전체 투자의 16%를 차지했다. 리벨리언, 퓨리오사AI, 메디트 세 곳이다. 결국 구조적 원인은 펀딩 구조 그 자체에 있다.

정부 자금은 민간 VC라는 중간 단계를 거쳐 창업자에게 전달된다. 국가가 정한 엄격한 보고 요건을 따라야 하는 VC는, 그 부담을 그대로 창업자에게 넘긴다. 한국의 창업·투자 환경을 다룬 한 독립 분석은 이런 구조를 ‘비효율의 삼각형’이라 부른다. 정부가 정책을 정하고, VC가 컴플라이언스를 관리하며, 창업자가 사실상 자기 자금의 행정관이 되는 구조다. 같은 분석은 창업자 인터뷰를 바탕으로, 창업자들이 제품을 다듬거나 고객과 대화하기보다 양식을 채우고 KPI를 증명하며 검토 서류를 준비하는 데 더 많은 시간을 쓰는 경우가 많다고 지적한다. 2026년 초 스타트업 얼라이언스가 국내 AI 스타트업 101곳을 조사한 결과에서도, AI 기본법에 대응할 준비를 시작한 곳은 단 2%에 그쳤고, 절반 가까운 기업이 이 법이 자사에 무엇을 요구하는지조차 파악하지 못한 상태였다. 이렇게 컴플라이언스 부담이 커질수록, 정작 초기 사업에 써야 할 시간과 노력은 줄어든다.

2025년 국정감사는 이런 구조가 낳은 비용을 정면으로 드러냈다. 국회 산업통상자원중소벤처기업위원회는 10월 23일 중소벤처기업부 산하 기관을 감사하면서, 한국벤처투자(KVIC)가 운용하는 모태펀드의 자펀드 계약에 ‘독소조항’이 들어 있었다는 사실을 공식 기록에 남겼다. IPO 목표를 달성하지 못한 스타트업이 연 20%에 이르는 위약금을 부담하도록 한 조항이다. KVIC 이대희 대표는 이 조항이 “바람직하지 않다”고 인정하면서도, 모태펀드가 전체 투자에서 차지하는 비중이 3%에 불과해 시정 권한이 제한된다고 밝혔다. 같은 해 스타트업 종사자의 직무 만족도는 35%로, 관련 통계 작성 이래 가장 낮았다. 구조는 견고하게 유지되고, 그 대가는 결국 그 안에 있는 사람들이 떠안게 된다.

행정관이 된 창업자

이 구조는 특정한 유형의 회사를 만든다. 한 대표적 사례를 따라가 보자. 정부 지원을 받아 베트남에 진출한 지 2년 차에 접어든 한 한국 창업자가 있다. 그는 정부 지원 보고서의 모든 마일스톤을 달성했고, 그 과정에서 지원 기업 가운데 우수상까지 받았다. 회사 등기에는 운영상 아무 역할이 없는 퇴임 대기업 임원이 한 명 올라 있다. 펀딩 기관에 잘 보이기 위한 자리다. 모든 행사와 미팅, 사소한 활동 하나까지 그가 직접 작성하는 관리 일지에 빠짐없이 기록된다. 사업 모델 자체에 처음부터 한계가 있었다. 정부가 원하는 그림에 맞춰, 그가 한국 안에서 보고 떠올린 아이템이었기 때문이다. 국내에서만 통하는 포인트 적립 방식처럼, 겉으로는 한국의 문제를 푸는 듯 보였지만 해외로 확장될 여지는 없었다. 여기에 컴플라이언스 부담까지 더해지며 운영 자금은 빠르게 줄었고, 완전히 지친 뒤에야 그는 앞으로 2년이 더 지나도 궤도가 바뀌지 않으리라는 사실을 받아들였다.

이 사례야말로 시스템이 의도한 그대로 만들어낸 결과다.

한국 시장을 평가하는 유럽이나 미국 투자자에게 이 구조는 구체적인 의미를 갖는다. 베를린의 패밀리오피스나 런던의 VC 앞에 앉은 한국 창업자는, 대개 앞서 설명한 구조가 길러낸 사람이다. 그는 설득력 있는 KPI 자료를 만들 줄 알고, 감사를 무리 없이 통과할 형태로 자신의 실적을 정리해둔다. 다만 노련한 해외 투자자는 여기서 한 가지 능력을 더 들여다본다. 깊은 불확실성을 충분히 견디면서, 처음 계획에는 없던 제품-시장 적합성(PMF)을 스스로 찾아내는 능력이다. 그러나 이런 능력은 한국 창업자가 거쳐온 환경에서 좀처럼 길러지지 않는다.

해외 자본이 선택하는 것

링크드인 공동창업자 리드 호프먼은 해외 자본이 보상하는 본능을, 실리콘밸리의 격언이 된 한 문장으로 표현했다. “제품의 첫 버전이 부끄럽지 않다면, 너무 늦게 출시한 것이다.” 이 말의 핵심은 가치가 어떻게 만들어지는가에 대한 관점이다. 가치는 출시와 피드백, 재조정을 반복하며 만들어지고, 그 속도는 꼼꼼한 문서화를 허용하지 않는다. 팀 쿡도 2019년 스탠퍼드 졸업 연설에서 비슷한 메시지를 전했다. “도전 속에서 용기를 찾고, 외로운 길 위에서 자신의 비전을 찾으라.” 두 창업 문화 모두 문서화보다 출시를 앞세운다.

문제는 여기서 시작된다. 한국 시스템 안에서 성공한 창업자는, 단정한 실행과 분명한 마일스톤, 보고 양식을 충실히 따르는 태도, 부끄러운 첫 버전을 내놓지 않으려는 신중함으로 보상받아 왔다. 모두 유럽 벤처캐피털이 흔히 위험 회피로 읽는 행동들이다. 그를 우수상으로 이끈 바로 그 습관이, 해외 LP 앞에서는 오히려 보수적이라는 평가로 이어진다. 반대 방향의 오해도 흔하다. 유럽 기관 투자자는 한국 창업자의 이런 문서 중심 태도를 그저 흥미로운 문화 차이쯤으로 가볍게 넘기기 쉽다. 그러나 그것은 한국 펀딩 구조가 만든 결과다. 창업자는 자신을 키운 시스템이 가르친 방식대로 말하고 있을 뿐이다.

한국 초기 단계 기업에 투자하는 자본은 사실상 한 가지를 더 분명히 구별해야 한다. 다수의 창업자는 KPI 규율을 몸에 익힌 사람들이다. 반면 그보다 적은 수의 창업자는, 그 문화에 적응하면서도 그 안에서 실험 정신을 잃지 않은 사람들이다. 두 번째 부류는 알아보기가 더 어렵다. 그래도 단서는 있다. 이들의 이력에는 대개 공식 지원 기록에 남지 않는 시기가 들어 있다. 지원금 없이 버틴 기간이나 한 시장에서 철수한 경험처럼, 서류에는 드러나지 않는 시간이다.

해외 투자를 기대하는 한국 창업자에게 정작 필요한 것은 관점의 전환이다. 한국의 지원 기관은 불확실성을 충분히 줄였다는 확신을 원하지만, 실리콘밸리 투자자는 그 불확실성을 견디며 배울 수 있다는 증거를 원한다. 이제 한국 창업자는 그 둘을 모두 보여줄 수 있어야 한다.

한국의 지원 시스템은 더없이 성실한 행정가를 길러냈다. 다만 시장이 요구하는 것은 창업자다.

참고 자료:

• 호프스테더 인사이츠, 국가 비교 도구 — 한국·미국·독일·일본: hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool

• 이창봉, “불확실성 회피성향으로 본 학폭 논란과 코로나 방역,” 오피니언뉴스, 2021년 3월 17일: opinionnews.co.kr

• KoreaTechDesk, “High Entry, Low Survival: What Korea’s Pre-Startup Package Reveals About Early-Stage Risk” — 예비창업패키지 생존율 추이 보도: koreatechdesk.com

• 중소벤처기업부, 2025년 3분기 벤처투자 데이터 (KoreaTechDesk, “2025 in Review” 보도): koreatechdesk.com

• 이글러 랩(Eagler Lab), “Beyond the Pitch Deck: What Founders Really Face in Korea,” 2025년 4월 11일 — 모태펀드 구조와 창업자 컴플라이언스 부담 분석: eagler.blog

• 스타트업 얼라이언스, AI 기본법 컴플라이언스 조사(101개 AI 스타트업) (KoreaTechDesk, “The New Compliance Divide” 보도): koreatechdesk.com

• 스타트업 얼라이언스·오픈서베이, 스타트업 트렌드 리포트 2025 — 종사자 직무 만족도 (Platum·KoreaTechDesk 보도): koreatechdesk.com

• 국회 산업통상자원중소벤처기업위원회, 2025년 국정감사 10월 23일 — 한국벤처투자(KVIC) 이대희 대표 모태펀드 자펀드 ‘독소조항’ 증언 (KoreaTechDesk, “National Audit 2025” 보도): koreatechdesk.com

• 리드 호프먼, “If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late,” 링크드인: linkedin.com/pulse

• 팀 쿡, 스탠퍼드대학교 졸업식 연설, 2019년 6월 16일, Stanford Report: news.stanford.edu

• Saint Clair 유럽–한국 회랑 자문 경험, 2016–2026.

고지: 이 글은 정보 제공을 목적으로 작성되었으며 투자 자문에 해당하지 않습니다. 모든 의사결정은 독립적인 조사와 자격을 갖춘 자문가의 상담을 바탕으로 이루어져야 합니다.

Saint Clair 소개: Saint Clair는 유럽과 아시아 사이의 크로스보더 자본 인프라를 설계하고 구축한다. 접근이 희소한 곳에 접근을 제안하고, 구조가 부재한 곳에 구조를 만들어낸다. 2016년 설립.

문의: saintclair.sg | contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | May 2026

Korea has built one of Asia’s largest public funding systems for early-stage companies. Trillions of won pass through the architecture each year. The outcome data is uneven: elevated five-year attrition among grant-supported firms; a 2025 in which the number of funded startups fell while aggregate capital concentrated in fewer hands; record-low job satisfaction in startup teams. The structural cause sits inside the funding architecture itself, and it produces a particular kind of founder. For European and American allocators evaluating Korean opportunities, recognising the type matters.

A Strategic Temperament

A German professional who worked at the Goethe-Institut in Seoul once held a single recurring question about her Korean colleagues. Why, she asked, did a person a few minutes late apologise so seriously? Germans are themselves famously punctual. The Korean sense of time, in her experience, sat beyond mere precision.

The data offers a frame. South Korea scores 85 on Hofstede’s Uncertainty Avoidance Index. Hofstede has been contested across two decades of cross-cultural literature; the framework remains useful as first-order comparison. Against the United States at 46, Germany at 65, and Japan at 92, Korea sits firmly in the upper band. Even Germany, a country built around the discipline of punctuality, comes in twenty points below.

Professor Lee Chang-bong of the Catholic University of Korea, a Penn-trained linguist who writes on Korean social patterns, traces several familiar phenomena back to this single trait. The instinct for hierarchical clarity. The speed with which Koreans establish who is who in any new group. The impulse toward conformity. He reads these as different surfaces of the same underlying intolerance for ambiguity. The same trait, he notes, produced palli-palli, the “hurry, hurry” reflex that, in the early days of COVID-19, allowed Korea to design drive-through testing, mobilise diagnostic kits, and stand up tracing infrastructure while Western health systems were still convening committees.

Uncertainty aversion is a strategic temperament. It built the conglomerate production lines that made Korean manufacturing legendary for precision. It produced K-방역, the country’s lauded pandemic response. The same instinct explains, in part, why a Korean child’s backpack rests neatly at the centre of the spine while an American child’s hangs sideways, strap twisted, and nobody minds. There is, however, one domain in which this temperament works against the people who carry it. Uncertainty is the raw condition of that work. The domain is the startup.

The Public Funding System

Over the past decade, Korea’s public startup funding apparatus has grown to a scale that ranks among Asia’s largest. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups runs the Pre-Startup Package, the Initial Startup Package, the Scale-Up Package, TIPS, and the K-Startup Grand Challenge (KSGC), among other programmes. Annual programme expenditure runs into the trillions of won. By the volume of capital deployed into early-stage company formation, Korea sits among the world’s most active sponsors.

The outcome record has drawn sustained critique. Korean reporting on the Pre-Startup Package, the Ministry’s flagship pre-incorporation grant formalised in 2019, points to elevated five-year attrition among supported firms, with knowledge-service ventures in AI and biotech surviving at lower rates than their manufacturing counterparts. The 2025 figures are firmer. The number of funded startups dropped to 3,136, a nine per cent year-on-year decline, while average investment per company rose 24 per cent to KRW 3.12 billion. Three deals accounted for 16 per cent of Q3 investment alone: Rebellions, FuriosaAI, and Medit. The structural cause sits inside the funding architecture.

Government money flows through private VC intermediaries, who must comply with strict reporting requirements set by the state. The intermediaries pass that burden down to founders. An independent Korean analysis of the funding architecture describes the result as a triangle of inefficiency: the government sets policy, the VC manages compliance, and the founder becomes the de facto administrator. The same analysis, drawing on founder interviews, puts it directly: “Founders routinely spend more time responding to templates, proving KPIs, and preparing review documents than refining their product or speaking with customers.” A separate Startup Alliance survey of 101 Korean AI startups in early 2026 found that only two per cent had begun preparing compliance frameworks under the country’s new AI Basic Act; nearly half had no plan or knowledge of the law’s full implications. As that compliance burden grows, it steadily crowds out the work early-stage company-building actually requires.

The 2025 National Assembly audit surfaced the structural cost directly. The National Assembly’s Industry, Trade, Energy, SMEs and Startups Committee, examining MSS-affiliated institutions on 23 October, established on the record that the Fund of Funds, operated by the Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC), had been allowing sub-fund contracts to carry “toxic clauses” requiring startups to pay up to twenty per cent annual damages if IPO targets were missed. KVIC’s chief executive Lee Dae-hee conceded the clauses were “undesirable” while noting that the Fund of Funds’ three per cent share of total investment limited the corporation’s authority to enforce correction. Startup-worker job satisfaction sat at 35 per cent in 2025, the lowest figure since the metric has been recorded. The architecture works; the people inside it carry the cost.

The Founder as Administrator

The pattern produces a particular kind of company. Consider a representative case: a Korean founder, two years into a government-backed expansion into Vietnam, has hit every milestone in her grant report and won an excellence award among the programme’s grantees along the way. Her company carries a retired conglomerate executive on its books with no operational role; he is on the cap table to satisfy the optics the funders expect. Every event, every meeting, every minor activity sits documented in a compliance log she maintains personally. The business model itself was limited from the outset. She had conceived it from within Korea, shaped to fit what the funders wanted: a domestic-only rewards scheme of the kind that looks like it solves a Korean problem yet has nowhere to scale abroad. The compliance overhead absorbed what cash remained, and only after exhaustion does she accept that the trajectory will not change in the next two years.

This case is what the system produces when it works exactly as designed.

For European or American investors evaluating Korean opportunities, the implication is specific. The Korean founder seated across from a Berlin family office or a London VC has usually been formed by the system above. She knows how to write a convincing KPI deck. She has documented her trajectory in a way that satisfies an auditor. The skill her formation has rarely required is the one seasoned foreign capital most wants to see: holding deep uncertainty long enough to recognise the contours of a product-market fit no one anticipated.

What Foreign Capital Selects For

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, captured the instinct foreign capital rewards in a line that has become Silicon Valley folklore: “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” The substance of the line is its implicit theory of value: that value is created through release, feedback, and recalibration, performed at a pace that makes thorough documentation impossible. Tim Cook, in his 2019 Stanford commencement address, sat in adjacent territory: “Find the courage in the challenge. Find your vision on the solitary road.” Both founder cultures reward release over documentation.

The bind begins here. The Korean founder who has thrived inside the Korean system has been rewarded for tidy execution, clear milestones, faithful adherence to the funder’s reporting templates, and a reluctance to ship the embarrassing first version. These are the very behaviours that European venture capital, on average, reads as risk aversion. The habits that won her that excellence award become, in front of a foreign LP, signals to discount as conservatism. The reverse error is also common. European allocators sometimes read the Korean founder’s documentation reflex as a cultural quirk to be charmed past, when it is in fact a structural artefact of Korea’s funding architecture. The founder is speaking the only language the system that raised her taught her to speak.

Capital flowing into Korean early-stage companies will need to sharpen one particular distinction. Many founders have internalised KPI discipline. A smaller cohort has learned to operate inside that culture while protecting an experimental temperament beneath it. The second cohort is harder to identify, but there is a tell. Their CV usually includes a stretch of unfunded work, an exit from a market, or a year unaccounted for in official grant records.

For Korean founders preparing to court foreign capital, what is needed is a shift of view. A Korean grant officer wants assurance that uncertainty has been engineered down; a Silicon Valley investor wants evidence that the founder can hold uncertainty long enough to learn from it. The same founder must now be able to show both.

Korea’s support system has raised exceptionally diligent administrators. What the market asks for, however, is founders.

Sources:

• Hofstede Insights, Country Comparison Tool — South Korea, United States, Germany, Japan: hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool

• Lee Chang-bong, “불확실성 회피성향으로 본 학폭 논란과 코로나 방역,” Opinion News, 17 March 2021: opinionnews.co.kr

• KoreaTechDesk, “High Entry, Low Survival: What Korea’s Pre-Startup Package Reveals About Early-Stage Risk,” on Pre-Startup Package survival patterns: koreatechdesk.com

• Ministry of SMEs and Startups, Q3 2025 venture investment data, as reported in KoreaTechDesk, “2025 in Review: Korea’s Startup Ecosystem at a Crossroads”: koreatechdesk.com

• Eagler Lab, “Beyond the Pitch Deck: What Founders Really Face in Korea,” 11 April 2025, on the Korean Fund of Funds structure and the founder compliance burden: eagler.blog

• Startup Alliance compliance survey of 101 Korean AI startups, on AI Basic Act preparation, as reported in KoreaTechDesk, “The New Compliance Divide: Who Can Afford to Follow Korea’s AI Basic Act?”: koreatechdesk.com

• Startup Alliance and OpenSurvey, Startup Trend Report 2025, on startup-worker job satisfaction, via Platum and KoreaTechDesk, “Policy Success, Human Cost: The Hidden Strain Behind Korea’s Startup Recovery”: koreatechdesk.com

• National Assembly Industry, Trade, Energy, SMEs and Startups Committee, 2025 audit hearing of 23 October — KVIC CEO Lee Dae-hee testimony on Fund of Funds “toxic clauses” and KOSME embezzlement, as reported in KoreaTechDesk, “National Audit 2025: Can Korea’s Public Venture System Restore Global Investor Confidence?”: koreatechdesk.com

• Reid Hoffman, “If There Aren’t Any Typos In This Essay, We Launched Too Late,” LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pulse

• Tim Cook, Stanford Commencement Address, 16 June 2019, Stanford Report: news.stanford.edu

• Saint Clair cross-border engagement experience, Europe–Korea corridor, 2016–2026.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair — Advisory & Capital: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia, proposing access where access is scarce and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair Market Intelligence | May 2026

In January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information announced what was billed as the world’s first governance framework for agentic AI. The document was technical, restrained, and carried Singapore’s institutional cadence. Within weeks, the framework had been parsed by every major international law firm with a digital-economy practice. Commentary surfaced across Brussels, London, Tokyo, and Singapore itself. None of the commentary disputed Singapore’s positioning. The question being asked was how to align.

The framework matters most for what it demonstrates. A small jurisdiction has acquired a category of geopolitical agency that sits outside the standard taxonomy of national power.

A third form of power

Hard power moves armies. Soft power persuades cultures. Susan Strange named a third in States and Markets (1988): structural power, the capacity to shape the architectures within which others operate. The contemporary form we examine here is sharper, and for small jurisdictions, more available than the literature suggested.

We will call it structure power: the ability to articulate the technical standards that others end up adopting, and through that articulation to set the operating conditions of an entire sector before any treaty is signed.

The mechanism has three components. Early articulation: the standard is written before the rest of the field has formed an opinion. Technical credibility: the institution doing the writing is taken seriously by practitioners. Interoperability: the standard is designed so that adopting it costs less than diverging from it. Where the three combine, the framework travels.

The combination is, paradoxically, most available to small jurisdictions. The constraints that prevent a small country from projecting force or culture are the same constraints that push it toward building the technical infrastructure others find convenient to adopt. Structure power, in this sense, is an inheritance of smallness disciplined by institutional depth.

Digital finance

The Monetary Authority of Singapore convened Project Guardian in 2022 as a sandbox for asset tokenisation. By 2026 the initiative had drawn in more than forty institutions across seven jurisdictions, including Japan’s Financial Services Agency, the UK Investment Association, Citi, HSBC, and Standard Chartered. More than fifteen industry trials had been run across six currencies. The trials were the visible activity; the structural move was elsewhere.

In November 2024, MAS published the Guardian Fixed Income Framework. The International Capital Market Association, the global standard-setter for fixed-income markets with members in more than seventy countries, agreed to lead the workstream. Twelve months later, ICMA published its own technical deliverables: a delivery-versus-payment settlement guide and a custody-arrangements review for DLT-based debt securities, formally branded as an addendum to the Singapore framework. At the same Singapore FinTech Festival, the Deutsche Bundesbank signed a memorandum of understanding with MAS naming Project Guardian as the collaborative platform for cross-border tokenisation. Singapore wrote the foundation; the international standards body built on it.

AI governance

Singapore’s Model AI Governance Framework, first released in 2019 and updated in 2020, established the architecture later inherited by the ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics in 2024. The same seven principles (transparency, fairness, safety, robustness, human-centricity, privacy, accountability) anchor both. The Guide was released at the fourth ASEAN Digital Ministers’ Meeting; Singapore was its convening host.

By 2026 the technical layer had deepened. The AI Verify Foundation, run as a not-for-profit with AWS, Dell, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Salesforce among its premier members, mapped its testing methodology against ISO/IEC 42001, the US NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the Hiroshima Process. In May 2026 Singapore tabled ISO/IEC 42119-8, a proposed international standard for the testing of generative-AI systems, with thirty-five national bodies and more than two hundred and fifty AI experts represented at the plenary. The agentic-AI framework launched at Davos was the next iteration: the discipline that defines the category before the rules harden.

Climate disclosure

The Singapore Exchange began incorporating IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards into mandatory climate reporting from financial year 2025, with phased extension running through 2030. Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions reporting became mandatory across all listed companies; Scope 3 became mandatory for STI constituents from 2026; ISSB-based broader disclosure for the rest of the market followed in tiers tied to capitalisation. The architecture is detailed, the timeline is published, and the sequencing logic is explicit.

Bursa Malaysia adopted the same ISSB-aligned framework on a parallel timeline, applying it to Main Market issuers above two billion ringgit from 2025. The Indonesian Institute of Chartered Accountants published draft sustainability standards in late 2024, structured to align with IFRS S1 and S2 from January 2027. Coordination runs through the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum. The regional sequence is observable: SGX first, Bursa Malaysia within twelve months, Indonesia within twenty-four. None of these jurisdictions was compelled. Each chose adoption over divergence.

The pattern and its limits

Three frameworks, three sectors, three documented adoption sequences. The mechanism is consistent. An institutional layer with technical depth (MAS, IMDA, SGX RegCo) articulates a position; an international body or a regional peer evaluates the work and finds it credible; adoption flows because the cost of building an alternative outweighs the cost of joining.

The pattern is real, and it is bounded. Singapore wrote one of the region’s earliest comprehensive data-protection regimes in 2012 and amended it materially in 2020. The amendment was not followed regionally. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines each built data-protection frameworks on different conceptual foundations, with materially divergent consent regimes. ASEAN responded with voluntary Model Contractual Clauses for cross-border transfers. The Singapore framework remained Singapore’s. The mechanism that delivers in finance, AI, and climate did not deliver in data protection. Structure power is selective; the same institutional weight does not transfer across every domain.

The Irreplaceability Diagnostic

The structural lesson sits one step away from the case. Every firm, every fund, every advisory practice, every jurisdiction operates on some mixture of two kinds of advantage. The first is replicable efficiency: the ability to run a process or produce an output at a cost or quality that meets the market standard. Replicable efficiency is table stakes. Over time, it commoditises. Competitors arrive; margins compress; the position is held by running harder; standing still loses it.

The second is structural irreplaceability: the position from which others reference you. A standards body cites your framework. A regulator builds on your methodology. A counterparty needs your jurisdiction in the deal architecture, or the architecture does not function. Structural irreplaceability is harder to build and harder to lose. It is the position the three Singapore sectors above have constructed.

We call this distinction the Irreplaceability Diagnostic. It applies anywhere a principal is willing to ask the question honestly: where am I structurally irreplaceable, and where am I merely efficient?

Where the floor sits

The honest answer is rarely flattering on first inspection. Most positions assumed to be irreplaceable turn out, under examination, to be efficient. Most positions assumed to be efficient turn out to be replicable. The diagnostic is uncomfortable because the floor of a position rarely matches the picture the principal carries of it.

Singapore’s example is instructive because the country has spent two decades engineering irreplaceability in three domains, while leaving the same machinery quiet in others. The discipline is portable. Whether a principal — firm, fund, or jurisdiction — runs it on themselves is a separate question.

Sources:

• MAS Project Guardian — https://www.mas.gov.sg/schemes-and-initiatives/project-guardian

• Guardian Fixed Income Framework v1.1 (November 2025) — https://www.mas.gov.sg/-/media/mas-media-library/development/fintech/guardian/guardian-fixed-income-framework-v1_1.pdf

• ICMA — Project Guardian Fixed Income workstream addendum (November 2025) — https://www.icmagroup.org/News/news-in-brief/project-guardian-fixed-income-workstream-deliverables-led-by-icma-published-as-an-addendum-to-the-guardian-fixed-income-framework/

• MAS–Deutsche Bundesbank MoU on tokenisation and cross-border settlement (Singapore FinTech Festival, November 2025) — https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2025/mas-and-deutsche-bundesbank-sign-mou-on-tokenisation-and-cross-border-settlement

• Singapore Launches New Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI (22 January 2026, World Economic Forum) — https://www.mddi.gov.sg/newsroom/singapore-launches-new-model-ai-governance-framework-for-agentic-ai--/

• ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics (February 2024) — https://asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/ASEAN-Guide-on-AI-Governance-and-Ethics_beautified_201223_v2.pdf

• IMDA — Singapore Champions New Global AI Testing Standardisation Efforts (ISO/IEC 42119-8) — https://www.imda.gov.sg/resources/press-releases-factsheets-and-speeches/press-releases/2026/singapore-champions-new-global-ai-testing-standardisation-efforts

• SGX RegCo — climate reporting incorporating IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards from FY 2025 — https://www.sgxgroup.com/media-centre/20240923-sgx-regco-start-incorporating-ifrs-sustainability-disclosure

• IFRS Foundation — Singapore Jurisdictional Profile (2025) — https://www.ifrs.org/content/dam/ifrs/publications/sustainability-jurisdictions/pdf-snapshots/singapore-ifrs-snapshot.pdf

• Susan Strange, States and Markets (Pinter, 1988) — foundational text on structural power in international political economy.

• PDPC Singapore — Comparing Consent Rules in General Data Protection Laws across Asia-Pacific — https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/comparing-consent-rules-in-general-data-protection-laws-across-asia-pacific

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair – Advisory & Capital: Saint Clair practises Capital Diplomacy — fostering cross-border investment relationships between Europe and Asia through trust, insight, and strategic facilitation. Since 2016, we have specialised in the Europe-Asia investment corridor.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Indonesia anchors every measure of size in Southeast Asia’s startup landscape: 283 million people, a digital economy approaching USD 100 billion, seventeen cumulative unicorns. The 2025 funding floor of USD 355.7 million represents roughly five per cent of the 2021 peak. Singapore now captures ninety-two per cent of the region’s startup capital; Indonesia, eight. Both facts are true simultaneously, and only one of them is the story the headline number tells.

Ground Truth: Indonesia | Saint Clair Market Intelligence | 18 May 2026

Based on DailySocial’s DiscoveryShift Indonesia Startup Report 2026, the Google / Temasek / Bain e-Conomy SEA 2025, and DealStreetAsia’s SEA Funding Full Year 2025, with supporting data from Visible.vc, Oblique Asia, AC Ventures & Bain, and the Asian Development Bank. Saint Clair’s analysis follows.

Indonesia does not lack scale. With 283 million people, a digital economy of USD 99 billion approaching the USD 100 billion mark, and seventeen cumulative unicorns including GoTo (the merged entity of Gojek and Tokopedia) and the travel platform Traveloka, the country anchors every measure of size in Southeast Asia’s startup landscape. By population, by gross merchandise value, by deal count, by sectoral breadth, Indonesia leads.

The structural fragility runs in parallel. Venture funding collapsed from USD 6.9 billion at the 2021 peak to USD 355.7 million in 2025, the bottom of a four-year contraction. Approximately ninety per cent of that capital comes from foreign sources. In the first half of 2025, ninety-two per cent of all Southeast Asian startup funding flowed through Singapore; Indonesia’s share was eight per cent. The capital remains within Southeast Asia. It has reallocated through Singapore.

The European institutional reader is conditioned to take size as a proxy for resilience. In Indonesia, the proxy fails. The 2025 story is a contraction stabilising at its floor: capital concentrates at the top of the funding stack while early-stage formation collapses underneath.

The Scale

Three hundred and five billion US dollars of gross merchandise value moved through Southeast Asia’s digital economy in 2025. Indonesia accounted for USD 99 billion of it, close to one-third of the regional total, with the country crossing the USD 100 billion threshold a year ahead of consensus projections. The country’s digital economy has more than doubled since 2019, when GMV stood at USD 41 billion. E-commerce alone reached USD 71 billion in 2025; digital payments transaction volume reached USD 538 billion, growing thirty-four per cent year on year.

The unicorn count tells the same story. Of fifty-nine cumulative unicorns produced across Southeast Asia, seventeen are Indonesian. Singapore holds thirty-one, but Singapore is the regional legal and financial hub; the gap reflects domicile choice as much as ecosystem maturity. The Indonesian seventeen include GoTo, formed from the 2021 merger of ride-hailing and super-app pioneer Gojek with e-commerce platform Tokopedia, and Traveloka, the country’s most internationally recognised consumer brand outside the super-app cohort. The cohort spans fintech, e-commerce, logistics, healthtech, and climate technology, with Indonesian companies present across every major venture-relevant sector.

Indonesia is the largest, most diversified, and most consumer-recognised startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia. Every variable a European institutional investor would screen on, from population scale to digital adoption to sectoral breadth, points toward Indonesia as the region’s anchor allocation.

The Funding Reality Underneath

Indonesia’s startup ecosystem raised USD 355.7 million in 2025, across ninety-one deals. The 2021 peak was USD 6.9 billion. The 2025 figure represents roughly five per cent of that peak, the floor of a ninety-five per cent collapse over four years. The deal count alone suggests something steadier (ninety-one deals in 2025 against 139 at peak), but the deal count obscures the architecture beneath it.

That architecture is concentration above, collapse below. In the first half of 2025, late-stage venture funding across Southeast Asia surged 140 per cent against the prior half, reaching USD 1.4 billion. Over the same nine-month window, seed funding collapsed seventy-two per cent, from USD 386 million to USD 110 million. Early-stage funding fell twenty-seven per cent. The Series B median valuation in the region jumped to USD 17.8 million from USD 10 million. The bar for capital has moved up while the volume of capital available below the bar has moved down.

The conversion arithmetic compounds the diagnosis. Approximately fifteen per cent of Indonesian early-stage companies progress to Series A. Pre-seed and seed deals account for sixty-seven per cent of all rounds but capture only a fraction of the capital; Series A through C captures eighty per cent of deployed capital across twenty-eight per cent of rounds. The pipeline is wide at the entry and narrow at the conversion, and the conversion gate has tightened.

Regional context underlines the structural reading. Across Southeast Asia, 461 equity deals closed in 2025, the lowest deal count in more than six years. The aggregate USD 5.4 billion deployed across the region sits below 2024, well below 2023, and at a fraction of the 2021 peak of USD 23.4 billion. Indonesia’s stabilisation is a national floor within a regional contraction. The 2025 Indonesian figure looks steady against the prior years; the regional total against which it sits has fallen further.

The quarterly view sharpens this further. Indonesian funding peaked in the third quarter of 2024 at USD 215.5 million, then collapsed to USD 20.3 million in the first quarter of 2025, the worst quarter on record outside the pandemic. The subsequent recovery was uneven: USD 184.1 million in the second quarter, USD 45.9 million in the third, USD 105.4 million in the fourth. The annual figure is the headline; the path through the year shows an ecosystem that has not yet found steady state, only a floor it occasionally drops below.

Singapore as the Mirror

The capital that left Indonesia stayed in Southeast Asia. It moved within the region, concentrating in Singapore.

In the first half of 2025, Singapore captured ninety-two per cent of all Southeast Asian startup funding, on the figures published by Visible.vc and Oblique Asia. The same H1 reading puts Indonesia at eight per cent, Vietnam at six, and the rest of the region sharing the residual. Singapore’s share of fintech funding is even higher: eighty-eight per cent of all regional fintech capital deployed in H1 2025. Three transactions (Thunes at USD 150 million, Airwallex at USD 150 million, Bolttech at USD 147 million) accounted for over half of the regional fintech total. None of them was Indonesian.

The Singapore concentration is the mirror image of Indonesia’s exposure. Singapore provides what Indonesia’s regulatory and financial infrastructure does not: a tested legal architecture for venture capital, an English-language compliance environment, a tax structure that international LPs understand, and exit-route plumbing through SGX or, more frequently, through M&A and secondary transactions structured offshore. The DiscoveryShift report describes the result with measured precision: “Singapore holding structures continued to serve as the preferred route for accessing regional capital and managing liquidity.”

For the European institutional reader, the implication runs in the opposite direction from how the regional concentration appears in passing reading. Singapore is the access route into the Indonesian market. Indonesian founders incorporate in Singapore because Singapore is where capital arrives. Deals are structured in Singapore because Singapore is where they can be financed and exited. The two ecosystems sit as two halves of a single capital architecture, with Singapore providing the legal and financial layer and Indonesia providing the underlying market.

This has consequences. When global venture sentiment tightens, as it did from late 2022 onward, the Singapore-domiciled capital base contracts faster than any domestic Indonesian base could buffer, because there is no domestic Indonesian base of comparable scale. The DiscoveryShift report makes the point explicitly: only ten per cent of digital-economy venture capital in Indonesia is domestically sourced. The remaining ninety per cent is structurally tied to global allocation cycles, and Singapore is the channel through which it flows.

The Quiet Constraint

The capital architecture is one half of the diagnosis. The capability architecture is the other.

Indonesia hosts approximately 120 startup incubators and accelerators. Sixty per cent sit on Java, the island that holds Jakarta. The Asian Development Bank’s mapping of the ecosystem describes most of them as constrained by limited management capacity and weak sector-specific expertise. Government-funded incubators, which form a substantial share of the cohort, are noted for limited commercial experience among their operators. Private incubators, by the same assessment, struggle to operate profitably, and the structure of government startup support creates a counter-intuitive distortion: public funds can be deployed into startups but cannot be deployed into the incubators that produce them. The factory, by design, is unfunded.

The talent layer carries a similar gap. The East Ventures Digital Competitiveness Index projects a shortfall of nine million digital workers against ecosystem demand by 2030. GenAI course enrolments tripled year on year in 2025; the absolute base remains small. Indonesian unicorns outbid early-stage startups for engineers, and the best founders, by the rational calculus of capital access and exit infrastructure, incorporate their next companies in Singapore.

Indonesia-centric venture capital has grown over the past five years. The AC Ventures and Bain regional report records the share at three per cent in 2018, fourteen per cent by 2022, and sixteen per cent by 2023. The trajectory is upward; the absolute base remains structurally inadequate for an ecosystem of this scale. When global capital tightens, Indonesia has no domestic buffer of meaningful weight. The CELIOS policy recommendations cited in the DiscoveryShift report identify strengthening domestic VC and institutional LP participation as the first priority. The recommendation has been made for several years; the underlying base has not yet responded at scale.

The compounding effect is not subtle. A capital architecture that depends on Singapore-routed foreign flows produces founders who optimise for Singapore-readable governance, Singapore-incorporated structures, and Singapore-mediated exits. A capability architecture that underfunds its own developmental layer produces a founder pipeline that converts the wrong proportion of its inputs into Series A outputs. Neither problem alone is binding; together they form the structural ceiling underneath which the ecosystem’s headline scale has stalled.

The Corridor View

Indonesia’s scale is real, and the case for the ecosystem rests on it. Two hundred and eighty-three million people will continue to digitise. A USD 99 billion digital economy will continue to compound. The seventeen unicorns reflect a track record of cross-border-relevant companies the region has not produced elsewhere outside Singapore.

The fragility is also real, and the case for patience rests on it. The 2025 funding floor is the bottom of a four-year contraction; the Singapore concentration is the structural reality of how regional capital flows; the domestic capital base remains inadequate; the founder-development layer is underfunded by design. The European institutional investor who reads Indonesia at its scale alone will misprice the entry point. The investor who reads Indonesia through its asymmetries will see an ecosystem in active reconstruction, with the actors building the next decade’s plumbing now visible to those who look.

Across Saint Clair’s Ground Truth coverage of frontier Asia, Indonesia sits at a different position from Sri Lanka, from Bangladesh, and from Korea. Sri Lanka has built early structural infrastructure (angel networks, domestic venture funds, a documented exit record) without yet building scale. Bangladesh has population and growth potential without yet building structure. Korea is sophisticated, mature, and structurally closed to most European capital. Indonesia carries the architecture of all three challenges at once: scale that has not produced depth, capital that flows through someone else’s jurisdiction, and an institutional base that has not yet developed the buffers the ecosystem’s size would warrant.

The corridor implication is straightforward, and it is structural. Singapore is the gateway through which institutional capital enters the region, and Indonesia is the largest market the gateway serves. The firms with credibility in both jurisdictions are the ones positioned to operate between them. For the patient European investor with an ASEAN remit, Indonesia rewards approach through the regional architecture that already exists. Conviction builds through the structural diagnostics the ecosystem’s scale conceals.

Sources:

• DailySocial / DiscoveryShift, Indonesia Startup Report 2026 (full-year 2025 Indonesia data; January 2026 release).

• Google, Temasek, Bain & Company, e-Conomy SEA 2025, 10th edition (November 2025).

• DealStreetAsia / Kickstart Ventures, SEA Funding Full Year 2025 Report (January 2026).

• AC Ventures and Bain & Company, Indonesia VC Report 2023 (December 2023).

• Visible.vc, 2026 Founder’s Guide to Raising Capital in Southeast Asia (January 2026).

• Oblique Asia, Southeast Asia Funding Trends 2025 (December 2025).

• Asian Development Bank, Indonesia Tech Startups: Voices from the Ecosystem (2024).

• East Ventures, Digital Competitiveness Index 2025 (March 2025).

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Saint Clair has an active engagement with frontier Asian startup ecosystems and may have commercial interests in markets discussed. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | saintclair.asia | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair Capital · Ground Truth | May 2026

The architecture for Asian secondaries is hardening faster than the Korean voluntary print can arrive. Two more independent advisers were absorbed into global platforms. Sovereigns sat on both sides of the largest disclosed processes. Korean policy capital anchored a 7 per cent return floor on the secondary segment. Each new external reference raises the bar the eventual Korean print must clear.

Lazard buys Campbell Lutyens for USD 575 million

Pan-Asian · Adviser-side · Secondaries Investor, 30 April

Lazard signed a definitive agreement to acquire Campbell Lutyens for USD 575 million, with up to USD 660 million after earn-out. The combined unit will trade as Lazard CL under co-CEOs Holcombe Green and Gordon Bajnai. It will run about 280 advisory professionals against an estimated 2027 revenue run-rate near USD 500 million. Closing is targeted for the second half of 2026.

This is the second top-tier independent secondaries adviser absorbed into a larger platform in four months — EQT took Coller in January. Two of the three benches Asian sponsors have used for first LP-led and GP-led mandates now sit inside global institutions with cross-sell agendas. Korean and Japanese GPs preparing first continuation vehicles will negotiate against a thinner independent panel at the precise moment Asian flow is accelerating.

Secondaries Investor

ADIA named preferred bidder on La Caisse’s USD 1.5 billion China sale

Greater China · LP-led · DealStreetAsia, 30 April

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has emerged as preferred bidder on La Caisse’s USD 1.5 billion China-focused private equity secondary. The underlying positions sit in fund stakes managed by HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China), Warburg Pincus and Boyu Capital. Greenhill is advising the seller. Pricing has not been disclosed, and ADIA is named preferred rather than final.

Both directions of 2026’s largest Asian-underlying processes have now closed through sovereign vehicles. ADIA bought from La Caisse. Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Ardian bought from CIC. Sovereign buyers hold longer than private secondaries funds and take more concentration. When the La Caisse price prints, it will sit alongside the CIC band as the second reference for Asian-underlying clearance.

DealStreetAsia

KVIC finalises nine secondary GPs at a 7 per cent IRR threshold

Korea · Sell-side · Bloter, 29 April

KVIC and the Ministry of SMEs and Startups confirmed nine secondary GPs in the 2026 First Regular Round of the Mother Fund on 29 April. Three sit in the general bucket; six in the small bucket. The performance-fee threshold is 7 per cent IRR — joint-highest in the programme. Aggregate child-fund capital in the secondary segment is KRW 140 billion, formed within three months of selection.

Korean policy capital is now treating the secondary segment as a standalone allocation line, priced for outperformance. The 7 per cent threshold becomes the benchmark Korean domestic secondary vintages will be measured against. Nine fresh mandates seed into the second half of 2026 alongside the broader KDB-anchored buy-side build. The infrastructure Edition 9 read as forming around an absent print is now forming faster than the print itself.

Bloter

Japan blocks MBK’s Makino tender under FEFTA Article 27(5)

Korea-Japan · Cross-border · Seoul Economic Daily, 1 May

MBK Partners accepted on 1 May the Japanese government’s recommendation to halt its JPY 275 billion tender offer for Makino Milling Machine. The action is the first formal use of FEFTA Article 27(5) since the 2017 amendment. The transaction is primary, not secondary — its relevance to Asian secondaries runs further.

MBK is Korea’s largest buyout sponsor and a frequent prospective seller in any future Asian LP-led process. A constraint on Japanese deployment reshapes its disposal arithmetic. More broadly, sponsors evaluating Japanese carve-outs adjacent to FEFTA core-industry categories (machine tools, semiconductors, nuclear, weapons) must now price an economic-security premium that did not exist eight years ago. Korean PE outbound into Japan operates under live precedent.

Seoul Economic Daily

64 per cent of APAC LPs plan to add secondaries exposure — up from 42 per cent

Pan-Asian · Buy-side · Coller Capital, May 2026

Coller Capital’s 2026 outlook reports 64 per cent of Asia-Pacific LPs intend to increase secondaries exposure over the next three years. The earlier reading was 42 per cent six months ago. India and Japan lead the country distribution; Korea reads structurally underweighted in the survey relative to its visible domestic build. Of APAC LPs surveyed, 67 per cent plan to expand alternatives allocations overall — the strongest regional reading in the survey.

The figures confirm a shift we have tracked through Partners Group’s ninth programme, Ardian’s ASF IX APAC anchor list and the Samsung Asset Management credit declaration. Asian LPs are no longer target deal-flow recipients. They are buyer-side participants. For Western sponsors marketing 2026 vintages, the read narrows: India and Japan country vehicles, or coherent Asia-focused regional theses.

Coller Capital

JIC commits JPY 12 billion to Polaris — Japanese sovereign LP build continues

Japan · Buy-side · Alternatives Watch, 4 May

Japan Investment Corporation committed JPY 12 billion (USD 74 million) to a Polaris Capital Group buyout fund targeting JPY 100 billion enterprise-value transactions. JIC’s stated rationale is that few Japan-focused managers can execute at that scale today. The commitment is sized to address the capacity gap.

The transaction is a primary commitment, not a secondary. The implication sits one layer back. Sovereign Japanese capital is deepening the primary buyout asset base from which Japanese continuation vehicles and LP-led trades will scale through 2027 and 2028. JIC’s role here parallels KVIC’s. Read alongside SMTB × Hunter Point in Edition 9 and the Coller data above, Japanese institutional capacity is forming at multiple layers simultaneously, ahead of the secondary supply the 2018–2020 vintage cohort will deliver.

Alternatives Watch

Market Intelligence

Korea’s National Growth Fund — 81 applications for 11 GP slots. KDB and Shinhan AM, on behalf of the FSC and the Ministry of Economy and Finance, received 81 PEF/VC applications by the 29 April deadline. Round-one allocation: KRW 1.385 trillion of commitment capital within a KRW 3.9 trillion indirect-investment tranche. Final selection: end-May. Bloter

Five-financial-group MOU at Tipsdown. KB, Shinhan, Hana, Woori and NH-Nonghyup signed a tripartite MOU with the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the FSC on 30 April. The headline is a private venture mother fund building to KRW 800 billion by 2029. The secondary-relevant element is a KRW 100 billion LP Growth Fund anchored with KVIC. Newspim

Korean 종투사 secondary plan signalled at KRW 1–2 trillion. Korea’s seven Comprehensive Investment Banks supplied KRW 9.88 trillion of risk capital in Q1 2026, up 25.7 per cent on Q4 2025. Financial authorities are reviewing a KRW 1–2 trillion secondary scheme with operating terms targeted by June. A 모험자본 intermediation platform launches in July. Etoday

Continuation-vehicle fee terms converge. Management fee, carry and hurdle terms on continuation vehicles are narrowing into a tighter band as buyer competition intensifies. For Asian sponsors structuring first continuation vehicles, the window for outsize fee retention is closing. Secondaries Investor

Korean dual-listing rules postponed to June. The Korea Exchange has pushed its dual-listing screening guidelines from May to June. The delay extends IPO-route uncertainty for conglomerate-controlled portfolio companies into Q2 and reinforces adjacent-channel demand among funds approaching maturity. Seoul Economic Daily

Signal

Two consolidations on the adviser side. Two sovereigns on the principal side. One Korean stack hardening without the print it was built to receive. That is the shape of the fortnight.

Edition 9 read the surrounding architecture as forming around an absent print. Edition 10 reads it as setting the terms the print will face. The CIC band, the ADIA clearance once it confirms, the KVIC 7 per cent threshold, the Lazard CL and EQT × Coller cost structures — each is an external reference the eventual Korean voluntary print will price against, not benefit from. We assess the cost of the delay as compounding, not diminishing. The first Korean LP-led print will arrive into an architecture that has matured without it.

Saint Clair Secondaries Briefing — Asia. Fortnightly. Published by Saint Clair Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

The briefing is editorial intelligence. It is not investment advice.

© 2026 Saint Clair Pte. Ltd.

Disclaimer: This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | May 2026

Korea’s most senior business voice articulated a doctrine on three dimensions of national confinement. The wire-service summary covered roughly a third of it. Allocators should read the full text.

Reading the Whole Speech

By the morning after Chey Tae-won spoke at the National Assembly on 28 April, the wire-service summary read: he proposed economic integration with Japan. The summary was accurate, and it covered roughly a third of what he said. Read in full, the speech is a doctrine on three dimensions of Korean confinement, with one through-line beneath: at national scale, Korea cannot resolve any of them.

Three institutional facts shape the speech. Chey chairs SK Group. He also chairs the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, through which he sustains a regular policy dialogue with Keidanren. Separately, he has run an eleven-year research line on the measurement of social value, with its own institute and tested methodology. The two chairmanships and the research line together give this speech the institutional weight that justifies reading it in full.

In his own framing, the speech sets out three problems. The first is capitalism: a slowing growth model now facing an AI shock measured in decades. The second is AI infrastructure: at the scale the next decade requires, Korea cannot mobilise the capital alone. The third is geopolitics: at one-tenth of China’s GDP, Korea cannot set the rules under which any of this gets built.

The single line uniting them runs beneath the surface. In each leg, Chey proposes the construction of a frame larger than the national one. The walls follow.

A Measurement Problem

Begin with capitalism’s own diagnosis. The dual engine of Korea’s post-war development (economic growth and democratisation) worked, and now slows on the growth side. Capital efficiency is falling. Returns from investment are thinning. The development model that produced the corporate economy now needs rewriting before the AI shock arrives, because the shock will run for a decade and reshape labour structures faster than retraining can absorb them. Existing instruments were calibrated for ordinary structural change. The velocity of AI substitution exceeds them.

His diagnosis is that capitalism mismeasures what it produces. The system counts monetary output. The jobs companies create, the environmental cost they avoid, the welfare contribution they make, the tax they pay — all are real outputs, all unpriced by markets, while governments collect taxes on monetary output and provide welfare downstream. The gap between what the economy produces and what the economy measures is, in Chey’s account, the reason public policy cannot keep pace with the AI shock.

This frame runs in direct parallel to the Beyond GDP debate alive in international scholarship since the Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi Commission’s 2009 report on economic performance and social progress. Diane Coyle’s GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014) traced the conceptual ceiling of monetary aggregates as performance measures. Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything (2018) extended the critique into who creates value and who captures it. Chey has spent eleven years working the same problem from inside Korean industrial scale, with a research institute and tested methodology behind him. The leg situates Korea inside an ongoing international scholarly conversation. Western allocators who read it as Chey’s private programme will misread its weight.

The policy form he proposes is two markets running in parallel: one priced in money, one priced in social value, with the state acting as referee. The labour-absorption capacity of the second market grows as the first contracts under AI substitution.

Saint Clair engages this leg on the terms Chey set. The measurement argument has its own technical literature, its own scepticism, its own difficulty. What it represents in this speech is a frame: the Korean economy will need a different ledger when AI arrives at full force. The capital-allocation implication sits in the lead time. Policy will be built around a measurement architecture Korean allocators will see assembled before international ones do, and the year in which the asymmetry closes is the year the discount disappears.

Capital and Concrete

The infrastructure leg is denominated in numbers. Chey identifies four bottlenecks in the AI build-out. Capital, electricity, GPUs, and memory. Each constrains the others.

The capital number he uses is direct. A one-gigawatt AI data centre costs roughly fifty billion dollars to build. Korea’s total data-centre capacity stands at around one gigawatt; Chey puts the share that is genuinely AI-capable at under five per cent. He estimates the requirement, for Korea to participate as a builder of the infrastructure decade, at ten to thirty gigawatts. The arithmetic at the upper end is half a trillion dollars to a trillion-five.

Electricity has shifted from a utility input to a structural constraint, and the deployment model has changed with it. Trump’s instruction to the American hyperscalers, in Chey’s recounting, was to generate their own power. The new pattern co-locates AI data centres with dedicated power plants, decoupled from the central grid, because the grid cannot absorb AI load fluctuation efficiently. China has built energy generation capacity faster than anyone else and continues to widen that lead. The United States retains its lead on advanced chips. Korea sits in the memory chokepoint, where three companies globally (two of them Korean) supply the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators require.

The GPU position is fluid. Nvidia’s lead remains, but the inference market is segmenting and the dominance of any single architecture loosens as workload diversifies. The memory position is tighter and likely to remain so.

Read carefully, the leg makes one argument. The capital required for Korea to be a builder in the AI era exceeds what national mobilisation can supply. The grid logic the build-out requires exceeds what national grid planning can deliver. The supplier concentration on memory exceeds what an independent national strategy can hedge. Each, on Chey’s reading, is a wall a country of fifty-one million cannot scale alone. The capital-allocation question for the next decade is on what terms Korea participates and at what scale of partner the participation requires.

An Island That Needs to Stop Being One

The third wall is the leg the press took. Chey’s framing is geographic. Korea sits on a peninsula; the continent is sealed by DPRK; the southern coastline opens to ocean alone. Korea’s economy, in functional terms, is an island economy. Its GDP is roughly one-tenth of China’s. The asymmetry mirrors how Korea regards any country at one-tenth of its own size. The relationship runs one way.

His proposal is integration with Japan, in a form serious enough that the rest of the world reads the combined economy as a single market. Combined GDP at six trillion dollars sits at roughly a third of China’s. At that scale, Korea–Japan becomes a structure the United States and China can no longer route around. Below that scale, they will. Chey invokes the EU as the analogue, with the operative observation that the EU began with France and Germany; the twenty-seven came later, because twenty-seven cannot rule with speed and a small core can.

From the integrated core, two extensions follow. The southern: ASEAN economies gravitate toward a six-trillion-dollar anchor, and an Asian-style community begins to form around it. The northern: China’s coastal northeast (산동성, 강소성, the three north-eastern provinces) and Russia’s Primorsky enter the bloc’s economic orbit, and the resulting gravitational pressure expresses itself against DPRK closure. Both extensions are long-dated. Chey treats them as the long-term premium that follows from integration; integration must come first.

Concrete first steps appear in the speech and in the questions that followed. A thirty-item integration list. Cross-border power lines and gas interconnects with Japan. Joint energy-cost reduction through shared infrastructure. KCCI’s standing dialogue with the Japan Chamber of Commerce. Tokyo has not reciprocated publicly at the level of the proposal. Korean political opposition retains historical sensitivities any administration must price.

The thesis is doctrine running ahead of mechanism. The gap is real, and it is the reason the speech matters as a signal. Doctrine articulated with this institutional weight, in this venue, is the form by which mechanism eventually arrives. The capital-allocation implication is that the integration thesis will compound across cycles even as discrete bilateral mechanisms remain slow.

What the Allocator Does Differently

Three walls, one logic. Capital allocation is implicated at each layer, and at each layer the constraint sits above what national mobilisation can resolve.

The signal weight sits in the seniority of the voice and in the public record building behind it. The chairman of SK and of KCCI is the most senior business voice in Korea, and he chose the National Assembly to articulate this, alongside February’s trilateral cooperation push and an eleven-year research programme on social value measurement.

The allocator who has read the speech in full asks different questions of Korean opportunities. On the measurement leg: when the new architecture comes into Korean policy, and how long the allocation lead time runs before international markets price it in. On the infrastructure leg: at what gigawatt commitment Korea participates in the AI build-out, and with which counterparties. On the integration leg: how fast Chey’s thesis converts from doctrine into bilateral mechanism, and which sectors compound the premium first.

The discipline of reading what the establishment reads, in its full register, comes before any position worth taking. Allocators who skip it work from the wire-service summary.

The measurement and isolation walls have particular instantiations in Korea’s venture maturity profile and contract architecture, which the Ground Truth: Korea Corridor sub-series addresses.

Sources

Primary: Chey Tae-won, transcript of address to National Assembly seminar hosted by the Korea–China Parliamentarians’ Union, 28 April 2026 (provided by Saint Clair).

• SK chairman calls for deeper South Korea-Japan economic ties — UPI, 28 Apr 2026

• KCCI chief suggests EU-style economic bloc between Korea, Japan — Korea Herald

• SK chief doubles down on Korea-Japan economic bloc push — Korea Herald

• Chey Tae-won urges Korea-Japan economic bloc — AJU Press, 28 Apr 2026

• 최태원 “AI 경쟁력 위해 일본과 협력해야”…한일 경제통합 제안 — 연합뉴스

• 최태원 회장 “한일 경제 통합으로 美·中에 맞서야” — 노컷뉴스

• 최태원 “AI 패권, 전기·자본에 달려…한일 경제통합, 생존 해법” — 디지털타임스

• 최태원 “AI 패권 경쟁…일본과 경제 통합하고 아시아연합 주도해야” — 아시아투데이

• Trilateral Cooperation Among Korea, the U.S., and Japan in the AI Era — Asia Business Daily, 22 Feb 2026

• Korea faces mounting calls for economic coalition with Japan — Korea Times, 15 Aug 2025

• Stiglitz, J., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

• Coyle, D. (2014). GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton University Press.

• Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair — Advisory & Capital: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

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사잇클레어 · 마켓 인텔리전스 | 2026년 5월

한국 재계 최고위 인사가 세 가지 차원에서 한국이 직면한 한계를 진단했다. 외신은 그중 약 3분의 1만 다뤘다. 기관 투자자라면 연설 전문을 읽어야 한다.

요약

최태원 SK그룹 회장이 4월 28일 국회에서 연설했다. 이튿날 아침 외신 헤드라인은 한 줄로 정리됐다. 그가 한일 경제 통합을 제안했다는 것이다. 정확한 요약이긴 했지만, 그가 한 말의 약 3분의 1만 담아낸 것이었다. 연설 전문을 읽으면 다른 그림이 나온다. 한국이 직면한 세 가지 한계를 차례로 진단한 한 편의 분석이고, 그 밑바탕에는 한 줄기 논리가 깔려 있다. 국가 차원에서 한국은 이 가운데 어느 하나도 단독으로 풀 수 없다는 것이다.

연설 전문 읽기

이 연설의 무게를 가늠하려면 먼저 두 가지 배경부터 봐야 한다. 최 회장은 SK그룹 회장이다. 동시에 대한상공회의소(KCCI) 회장으로서 일본 게이단렌(経団連)과 정례 정책 대화를 이어가고 있다. 별개로 사회적 가치 측정 연구를 11년째 이어오면서 자체 연구소와 검증된 방법론을 갖춰놓았다. 이 두 회장직에 11년 연구가 더해지면, 이 연설은 단순한 재계 인사의 즉흥 발언과는 결이 달라진다.

연설은 그의 표현을 빌리면 세 가지 문제를 차례로 짚는다. 첫째는 자본주의 체제 자체다. 성장 모델이 둔화하는 가운데 여기에 십수 년에 걸친 AI 충격이 더해지고 있다. 둘째는 AI 인프라다. 향후 십 년이 요구하는 규모를 한국이 단독으로 동원하기는 어렵다. 셋째는 지정학이다. 중국 GDP의 10분의 1 수준에서 한국이 모든 규칙을 정할 수는 없다.

이 세 가지를 잇는 한 줄기 논리는 표면에 쉽게 드러나지 않지만, 결국 최 회장이 매번 제안하는 것은 한 가지다. 국가보다 큰 단위의 틀을 만들자는 것이며, 그 위에 세 개의 벽이 차례로 모습을 드러낸다.

첫 번째 벽 — 측정의 문제

먼저 자본주의 체제 자체에 대한 진단이다. 한국 전후 발전을 떠받친 두 축, 즉 경제 성장과 민주화는 제 역할을 다했다. 다만 성장 축이 둔화 국면에 들어섰다. 자본 효율성은 떨어지고, 투자 수익률은 갈수록 박해지고 있다. 대기업 중심으로 짜여온 발전 모델은 AI 충격이 본격화되기 전에 새로 짜야 한다. 이 충격은 십 년 단위로 펼쳐지고, 재교육이 따라잡을 수 없는 속도로 노동 구조를 갈아엎을 가능성이 높기 때문이다. 기존 제도는 평상시의 구조 변화를 전제로 만들어져 있지만, AI가 일자리를 대체하는 속도는 이미 그 전제를 넘어섰다.

진단의 핵심은 자본주의 체제가 만들어내는 산출물을 제대로 측정하지 못한다는 데 있다. 이 시스템은 화폐로 환산되는 산출만 집계한다. 기업이 만들어내는 일자리, 기업이 회피한 환경 비용, 기업이 일군 복지 효과, 기업이 납부한 세금까지 — 모두 실재하는 산출이지만 시장 가격이 매겨지지 않는다. 정부는 화폐 산출에 매긴 세금을 거둬들여 그 다음 단계에서 복지로 돌려준다. 경제가 만들어내는 것과 경제가 측정하는 것 사이의 간극이, 최 회장의 설명대로라면, 공공 정책이 AI 충격을 따라잡지 못하는 이유다.

이 문제 의식은 2009년 스티글리츠–센–피투시 위원회(Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi Commission)의 ‘경제 성과 및 사회 진보 측정’ 보고서 이후 국제 학계에서 살아 있는 ‘GDP 너머(Beyond GDP)’ 논쟁과 곧바로 맞물린다. 다이앤 코일(Diane Coyle)의 『GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History』(2014)는 화폐 총량이 성과 측정 도구로서 갖는 한계를 짚었고, 마리아나 마추카토(Mariana Mazzucato)의 『The Value of Everything』(2018)은 누가 가치를 만들고 누가 가져가는가의 문제로 같은 비판을 확장했다. 최 회장은 같은 질문을 한국 산업의 규모 안에서 11년에 걸쳐 다뤄왔고, 자체 연구소와 검증된 방법론이 그 작업을 받친다. 이 부분은 결국 한국을 ‘GDP 너머’ 논쟁의 한국판 무대에 올리는 시도다. 만약 이를 최 회장 개인의 사적 프로젝트 정도로 읽는 서구 기관 투자자가 있다면, 그 무게를 잘못 읽은 것이다.

그가 제시하는 정책의 형태는 두 시장을 함께 운용하는 방식이다. 한쪽 시장은 화폐로 가격이 매겨지고, 다른 한쪽은 사회적 가치로 가격이 매겨진다. 국가는 그 사이에서 심판자 역할을 맡는다. 결국 첫 번째 시장이 AI 대체로 줄어드는 만큼을, 두 번째 시장의 고용 흡수력이 일정 부분 메워준다는 구상이다.

사잇클레어는 최 회장이 설정한 조건 안에서 이 부분을 다룬다. 측정 논의 자체는 전문 문헌, 회의론, 기술적 난이도를 안고 있는 영역이다. 다만 이 연설의 핵심은 결국 하나로 모인다. AI가 본격 도래할 때, 한국 경제가 지금과는 다른 측정 체계를 필요로 하게 된다는 점이다. 자본 배분 관점에서 보면 결국 ‘시점’이 관건이다. 새 측정 체계는 한국 정책에 먼저 자리잡고, 국제 시장이 그 변화를 자산 가격에 반영하기까지는 시차가 따른다. 그 시차가 좁혀질 때, 한국 자산에 적용되어 온 코리아 디스카운트도 같이 풀린다.

두 번째 벽 — 자본과 콘크리트

인프라 진단은 숫자로 표시된다. 최 회장은 AI 구축의 네 가지 병목을 짚는다. 자본, 전력, GPU, 메모리. 이 넷이 서로를 제약한다.

그가 인용하는 자본 숫자는 직설적이다. 1기가와트(GW)급 AI 데이터센터를 짓는 데 약 500억 달러가 든다. 한국 전체 데이터센터 용량은 약 1GW 수준이지만, 그중에서 진정한 AI 가용 용량은 5%에 못 미친다는 게 그의 진단이다. 향후 십 년의 AI 인프라에서 한국이 단순 사용자가 아니라 인프라 구축 주체로 참여하려면 10~30GW가 필요하며, 상한선으로 환산하면 5,000억 달러에서 1조5,000억 달러 규모의 투자가 따라야 한다는 게 그의 추산이다.

전력은 일반적인 유틸리티 입력 요소에서 구조적 제약 요인으로 부상했다. 배치 모델도 그에 맞춰 바뀌었다. 최 회장의 전언에 따르면, 트럼프 미 대통령이 미국 빅테크에 내린 지시는 ‘전력은 알아서 만들어 쓰라’였다. 새로운 패턴은 AI 데이터센터를 전용 발전소와 같은 부지에 두고 중앙 전력망에서 분리하는 방식이다. 중앙망이 AI의 부하 변동을 효율적으로 흡수하지 못하기 때문이다. 중국은 누구보다 빠르게 발전 용량을 늘려왔고 그 격차를 계속 벌리고 있다. 미국은 첨단 칩에서 우위를 유지하는 반면, 한국은 메모리 병목 위치에 놓인다. AI 가속기에 들어가는 고대역폭 메모리(HBM)를 공급할 수 있는 회사는 전 세계에서 단 세 곳, 그중 두 곳이 한국 기업이다.

GPU 위치는 유동적이다. 엔비디아의 우위는 여전하지만, 추론(inference) 시장이 분화하면서 특정 칩 아키텍처의 지배력은 약해지고 있다. 반면 메모리 위치는 더 좁고, 그 좁은 상태로 유지될 가능성이 높다.

이 부분의 결론은 분명하다. AI 시대의 인프라 구축 주체로 한국이 참여하기 위한 자본 규모는 국가 동원만으로 채울 수 있는 수준을 넘어선다. 구축에 필요한 그리드 논리 또한 국가 그리드 계획만으로는 감당하기 어렵다. 메모리의 공급자 집중 또한 한 나라 전략만으로 위험을 분산하기 어려운 수준이다. 이 셋이 모두, 최 회장의 독해로는, 5,100만 인구의 국가가 단독으로 넘기 어려운 벽이다. 향후 십 년의 자본 배분 질문은 결국 한 줄로 좁혀진다. 한국은 어떤 조건으로 글로벌 AI 인프라 경쟁에 들어가야 하며, 그 조건이 요구하는 파트너 규모를 어디서 찾을 것인가.

세 번째 벽 — 섬을 벗어나야 할 섬

세 번째 벽은 외신이 다룬 부분이다. 최 회장의 분석은 지리에서 출발한다. 한국은 반도에 자리한다. 대륙은 북한에 가로막혀 있고 남쪽 해안은 대양으로만 열려 있다. 한국 경제는 기능적으로 보면 섬 경제다. GDP는 대략 중국의 10분의 1 수준이다. 이 격차는 결국 한국이 자기 규모의 10분의 1 국가를 대하는 방식과 같은 구도다. 관계는 일방적이다.

그가 내놓는 제안은 한일 통합이다. 외부에서 두 경제를 사실상 단일 시장으로 받아들일 만큼 깊이 들어가야 한다는 게 그 핵심이다. 합쳐진 GDP 6조 달러는 대략 중국의 3분의 1 규모다. 그 수준에 이르러야 한일 결합 경제는 미국과 중국이 더 이상 우회할 수 없는 구조가 된다. 그보다 작은 규모에서는 우회된다. 최 회장은 EU를 비유로 든다. 핵심은 EU가 27개 회원국으로 출발하지 않았다는 점이다. 시작은 프랑스와 독일이었다. 27개국이 함께 결정하기에는 속도가 따라주지 않았고, 핵심 국가들이 먼저 묶여야 빠른 의사결정이 가능했기 때문이다.

통합된 핵심에서 두 가지 확장이 따라붙는다. 남쪽 모델은 아세안 경제를 6조 달러 닻 쪽으로 끌어당기면서 그 주변에 아시아형 공동체가 형성되는 그림이다. 북쪽 모델은 중국 동북부 연안(산둥성, 장쑤성, 동북 3성)과 러시아 연해주가 블록의 경제 궤도에 들어오고, 그 결과 형성되는 경제적 압력이 결국 북한 개방에도 영향을 미칠 수 있다는 시나리오다. 둘 다 장기 시나리오다. 최 회장은 이 두 모델을 통합 이후 따라올 장기 부가 효과로 본다. 통합이 먼저 자리를 잡아야 그 다음 단계로 나아갈 수 있다는 입장이다.

연설과 이어진 질의에서 한일 통합을 위한 구체적 추진 항목 30개가 거론됐다. 그 가운데에는 일본과의 국경 간 송전망과 가스 연결망, 공동 인프라를 통한 양국 에너지 비용 동반 절감, KCCI와 일본상공회의소가 정례적으로 이어오고 있는 대화 등이 포함됐다. 도쿄 측은 이 제안에 공식 화답을 하지 않았다. 한국 정치권에는 어느 정부든 신중하게 다뤄야 할 역사적 사안이 함께 걸린다.

핵심은 결국 하나다. 이 진단은 실제 양국 간 합의보다 먼저 형성되고 있다. 바로 그 시차 때문에 이 연설은 시장이 주목해야 할 신호가 된다. 같은 무게의 진단이 같은 자리에서 같은 인사의 입을 통해 전해질 때, 그것이 결국 양국 합의로 가는 길이 되기 때문이다. 자본 배분 관점에서의 함의 역시 분명하다. 진단은 시간이 갈수록 더 쌓여가지만, 실제 합의는 그보다 한참 늦게 뒤따른다.

기관 투자자의 새 질문

세 개의 벽, 한 줄기 논리다. 어느 벽에서든 자본 배분 문제가 같이 걸리고, 어느 벽에서든 그 제약은 한 나라가 단독으로 풀어낼 수 있는 수준을 넘어선다.

이 연설을 무게 있는 시장 신호로 여기는 이유는 두 가지다. 첫째는 발언자다. SK그룹과 KCCI 회장은 한국 재계에서 가장 권위 있는 자리이고, 그가 이번 메시지를 전한 자리는 국회였다. 둘째는 그가 같은 영역에서 보여온 일관된 행보다. 2월의 한·미·일 협력 추진, 그리고 11년에 걸쳐 이어온 사회적 가치 측정 연구가 그 행보다.

연설 전문을 읽은 기관 투자자라면 한국에서의 기회에 대한 질문 자체를 달리하게 된다. 측정 부분에서 던질 질문은 두 가지다. 새 측정 체계가 한국 정책에 언제 도입될 것인가, 그리고 국제 시장이 그 변화를 자산 가격에 반영하기까지 얼마나 걸릴 것인가. 인프라 부분에서도 두 가지를 본다. 한국이 어느 정도 규모의 GW 단위 투자 약속을 들고 들어가는지, 그리고 그 약속의 파트너가 누구일지다. 통합 부분에서는 최 회장의 진단이 실제 양국 간 합의로 넘어가는 속도가 얼마나 빠를지, 그리고 그 효과를 가장 먼저 흡수할 산업이 어디일지가 다음 질문이다.

투자 포지션을 잡기 전에, 한국 재계 최상위 인사들이 시장을 어떤 시각으로 읽고 있는지를 같은 깊이로 따라잡는 작업이 먼저다. 이 단계를 건너뛰면 기관 투자자는 외신 헤드라인 수준의 정보로 의사결정을 내리게 된다.

세 개의 벽 가운데 측정의 벽과 고립의 벽이 한국 자본 시장에 어떤 구체적 모습으로 자리잡는지는 이 시리즈의 다음 글 Ground Truth: Korea Corridor가 이어서 다룬다.

출처

1차 자료: 최태원 회장, 4월 28일 한·중 의원외교포럼 주최 국회 세미나 연설 전문 (사잇클레어 보유본).

• SK chairman calls for deeper South Korea-Japan economic ties — UPI, 28 Apr 2026

• KCCI chief suggests EU-style economic bloc between Korea, Japan — Korea Herald

• SK chief doubles down on Korea-Japan economic bloc push — Korea Herald

• Chey Tae-won urges Korea-Japan economic bloc — AJU Press, 28 Apr 2026

• 최태원 “AI 경쟁력 위해 일본과 협력해야”…한일 경제통합 제안 — 연합뉴스

• 최태원 회장 “한일 경제 통합으로 美·中에 맞서야” — 노컷뉴스

• 최태원 “AI 패권, 전기·자본에 달려…한일 경제통합, 생존 해법” — 디지털타임스

• 최태원 “AI 패권 경쟁…일본과 경제 통합하고 아시아연합 주도해야” — 아시아투데이

• Trilateral Cooperation Among Korea, the U.S., and Japan in the AI Era — Asia Business Daily, 22 Feb 2026

• Korea faces mounting calls for economic coalition with Japan — Korea Times, 15 Aug 2025

• Stiglitz, J., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.

• Coyle, D. (2014). GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Princeton University Press.

• Mazzucato, M. (2018). The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane.

고지: 본 글은 정보 제공만을 목적으로 한다. 투자 자문에 해당하지 않는다. 모든 의사결정은 독자적 조사와 자격을 갖춘 자문가의 상담을 기반으로 이뤄져야 한다.

사잇클레어 — Advisory & Capital 소개: 사잇클레어는 유럽과 아시아 사이의 국경 간 자본 인프라를 설계하고 구축한다. 접근이 희소한 곳에 접근을 제안하고, 구조가 부재한 곳에 구조를 만든다. 2016년 이래로.

더 알아보기: saintclair.sg | 문의: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair Capital · 그라운드 트루스 | 2026년 5월

Lazard Inc.가 4월 30일 Campbell Lutyens 인수에 합의했다. 기본 인수가는 약 5억 7,500만 달러. 거래 종결 시 4억 6,000만 달러를 지급하고, 나머지 1억 1,500만 달러는 이연 처리한다. 여기에 어닝아웃 8,500만 달러를 더하면 총 인수가는 최대 6억 6,000만 달러에 이른다. 거래 종결은 2026년 하반기로 예정돼 있으며, 규제 당국 승인을 전제로 한다. 통합 후 사명은 ‘Lazard CL’이며, 홀컴 그린(Holcombe Green)과 고든 바이나이(Gordon Bajnai)가 공동 대표를 맡는다. 자문 인력은 약 280명, 2027년 매출 가이던스는 5억 달러다. Campbell Lutyens는 서울·도쿄·홍콩·싱가포르·멜버른에 아시아 거점을 두고 있다. 아시아에서 가장 탄탄했던 독립 세컨더리 자문 진영이 이제 글로벌 투자은행 산하로 들어간다.

이 거래는 아시아 매도자에게 특히 의미가 크다. Campbell Lutyens는 누적 1,000억 달러를 넘는 세컨더리 거래에 자문을 제공했고, 지난 2년간 1,900억 달러 이상의 펀드 결성을 도왔다. 활동의 상당 부분이 아시아 네트워크를 통해 이뤄졌다. 한국 GP를 북미 매수자 신디케이트와 잇고, 일본 GP를 글로벌 컨티뉴에이션 펀드 앵커 LP에 연결하며, 중국 기관 매도자를 국제 배치 채널로 안내한 자문 사례들이 그 대표적 모습이다. 2026년 하반기부터 이 역량은 독립 자문사가 아니라 Lazard 산하 통합 플랫폼 안에서 펼쳐진다.

이 시리즈는 그동안 아시아 PE 세컨더리 시장을 매수자 측 집중, 가격 분산, 두 장부 프로세스 구조, 그리고 평행 시장으로 떠오르는 크레딧 부문이라는 네 측면에서 짚어왔다. 이번 5편은 여기에 다섯 번째 변수를 보탠다. 바로 ‘누가 아시아 매도자에게 자문하는가’다. 이 변수는 2026년 들어 실질적으로 달라졌고, 자문사 선택은 이제 분석 프레임의 다섯 번째 축으로 자리 잡는다. 2026~2027년 컨티뉴에이션 펀드나 LP 주도 프로세스를 검토하는 아시아 매도자는 2024년에는 없었던 자문사 선택지를 놓고 결정을 내려야 한다.

1월의 전조

1월 22일 EQT가 Coller Capital과의 통합에 합의했다. 거래 규모는 EQT 주식 32억 달러에 조건부 대가 5억 달러를 더한 수준. 거래 종결 시 세컨더리 운용자산(AUM) 500억 달러와 함께 아시아 집행 맨데이트가 명시적으로 포함됐다. 거래 구조는 Lazard·Campbell Lutyens와 결이 다르다. EQT는 매수 측 플랫폼을 인수했고, Lazard는 자문사를 인수했다. 두 거래를 한 묶음으로 보면 서로 다른 두 현상이 뭉개진다.

뿌리는 같다. 세컨더리 전문 중개가 기관화되고 있다. 매수자 측에서는 자본이 독립 운용사에서 통합 플랫폼으로 이동한다. 자문사 측에서는 전문성이 독립 자문사에서 글로벌 투자은행으로 이동한다. 두 흐름 모두 세컨더리 시장 최상단에서 전문성과 독립 거버넌스를 갖춘 자문 주체의 수를 줄인다. 2026~2027년 프로세스를 검토하는 아시아 매도자에게 그 결과는 같은 방향이다. 시장 최상단에 독립적인 중개 창구가 줄어든다.

두 거래를 종합해 보면 흐름이 또렷하다. 4개월이라는 짧은 기간에 아시아 맨데이트에서 활약해온 독립 세컨더리 전문사 상위 3곳 가운데 두 곳이 대형 기관 산하로 들어간 셈이다. 독립 투자은행 진영에서는 Jefferies가 아시아 세컨더리 시장의 주요 경쟁자로 남는다. 그 뒤를 Greenhill, Park Hill, Houlihan Lokey, Eaton Partners가 한 단계 얇아진 2층에서 받친다. 결과적으로 2026년의 독립 자문 층은 2025년 대비 구조적으로 더 좁다. 이 통합은 올해 초 시장 참가자 누구도 예상하지 못한 속도로 진행됐다.

비대칭

아시아는 2025년 글로벌 LP 주도 세컨더리 거래량의 약 4%를 차지했다. Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer 1월 데이터 기준, 1,250억 달러 글로벌 LP 주도 총액 가운데 약 50억 달러 수준이다. HSF Kramer의 2026년 1분기 업데이트는 더 흥미로운 그림을 보여준다. 글로벌 세컨더리 회전율은 사상 최대 2,400억 달러(Jefferies 기준)를 기록했지만, 아시아 세컨더리 펀드 결성에서는 “특히 두드러진 감소”가 나타났다는 진단이다. (이 시리즈가 그동안 인용해온 Campbell Lutyens 기준 2,250억 달러와는 산정 방식이 다르다.) 베인앤컴퍼니의 2026 APAC 리포트는 지역 세컨더리 거래 규모가 전년 대비 41% 늘었다고 집계했다. 다만 그 출발점은 아시아 사모펀드 운용자산에서 차지하는 비중에 한참 못 미친다.

비대칭이 분명하다. 아시아의 자문 역량이 아시아 시장 자체보다 먼저 기관화되고 있다. 작은 티켓 사이즈와 복잡한 관할권은 깊은 관계 자본과 긴 프로세스 호흡을 요구한다. 정작 독립 자문 인프라가 가장 절실한 시장에서, 그 최상위 인프라가 가장 빠르게 통합되고 있다는 뜻이다. 거래량이 늘면 중개도 따라 커진다는 통상적 흐름이 뒤집혔다. 아시아 세컨더리에서는 중개가 거래량보다 앞서 성장하고 기관화된다.

남은 벤치

통합 이후 아시아 세컨더리 맨데이트의 자문 층은 세 단계로 갈린다.

첫 번째는 기관 자문 플랫폼 층이다. Lazard CL(2026년 하반기 거래 종결 예정), EQT 직영 세컨더리 부문(Coller 통합 이후), 골드만삭스 자산운용 산하 페터스힐 사모 자문, JPMorgan Private Capital Markets, Evercore Private Capital Advisory, 그리고 소수의 대형 투자은행 팀이 여기에 속한다. 모회사 거버넌스 체제 아래 자본력이 두텁다. 다만 아시아 세컨더리 맨데이트에 어느 정도 자원이 배분될지는 모회사 플랫폼의 이해상충 구조와 인력 배치에 달려 있다.

두 번째는 독립 자문사 층이다. Jefferies가 선두에 자리하고, Greenhill, Park Hill, Houlihan Lokey, Eaton Partners가 그 뒤를 잇는다. 모회사 차원의 이해상충 부담 없이 운용된다는 점이 강점이다. 한계는 다른 데 있다. 거버넌스의 복잡성이 아니라 자문 인력의 두께가 문제다. 작은 아시아 티켓에 긴 프로세스 호흡을 감당할 의지는 통합 일정보다 수수료 경제학이 결정한다.

세 번째는 아시아 토종 자문사 층이다. 아직 형성 단계다. 한국 금융그룹 산하 자문 팀, 일본 자산운용사와 손잡은 세컨더리 플랫폼, 싱가포르 기반 독립 자문사들이 윤곽을 갖춰가고 있다. 그러나 국제 매수자 신디케이트와 함께 움직이는 크로스보더 아시아 세컨더리 맨데이트를 최상위 규모로 다루는 곳은 아직 등장하지 않았다. 진영은 모습을 갖춰가는 중이지만, 역량은 더 다져져야 한다.

2026~2027년 아시아 매도자의 자문사 선택은 이 세 층 안에서 이뤄진다. 모회사 거버넌스 체제를 갖춘 기관 플랫폼, 투자은행 색채가 더 짙은 독립 자문사, 그리고 국제 네트워크가 아직 다 짜이지 않은 아시아 토종 자문사가 그 세 갈래다. 다만 탄탄한 아시아 관계망을 갖춘 독립 전문 자문사는 지난 4개월 사이 두 곳이 사라졌다.

리더십 연속성과 통합 창

Lazard CL 경영진은 통합 이후에도 자문 부문의 성격을 유지한다는 입장이다. Holcombe Green과 Gordon Bajnai가 통합 법인의 공동 대표직을 그대로 맡는다. 그러나 투자은행이 자문사를 인수한 유사 사례들을 보면 신중함이 필요하다. 블랙스톤 산하 Park Hill, 여러 투자은행 안에 자리잡은 다양한 M&A 자문 사업부가 그 예다. 이들 사례에서는 통합 역학이 눈에 띄는 상업적 이해상충이나 문화적 변화로 이어지기까지 통상 24~36개월이 걸렸다. 따라서 거래 종결 직후 단계에서 진행 중인 프로세스를 가진 클라이언트의 일상 자문 경험은 크게 달라지지 않을 가능성이 높다.

다만 이 글이 짚는 구조적 쟁점은 더 긴 시간축을 본다. 2026년 말 프로세스를 시작하는 한국 GP에게 당장의 실무 질문은 자신이 계약한 시니어 자문역이 거래 완결 시점까지 자리를 지킬지다. 그러나 더 긴 호흡으로 던져야 할 질문은 따로 있다. 통합이 굳어진 뒤에도 모회사의 이해상충 구조와 수수료 경제, 자원 배분 방식이 작은 티켓·긴 호흡 맨데이트를 받쳐줄 것인가. Campbell Lutyens의 아시아 작업을 떠받쳐온 바로 그 호흡 말이다. 답은 아직 정해지지 않았다. 향후 모회사가 내릴 개별 통합 결정과, 같은 시기 모회사의 다른 사업부가 어떻게 진화하느냐에 달려 있다.

국내 대안

모든 아시아 매도자가 프로세스 체결을 위해 글로벌 최상위 독립 자문사를 반드시 거쳐야 하는 것은 아니다. 시장 규모가 한정적이어서 한두 곳의 전문 자문사와 얇아진 2층만으로도 충분히 소화된다. 일부 부문에서는 아시아 토종 자문 역량이 충분한 대안이 된다. 탄탄한 국내 LP 관계와 한국어 펀드 문서를 갖춘 한국 소형 GP라면, 글로벌 플랫폼보다 KVIC와 호흡을 맞춰온 국내 자문사를 통해 더 효율적으로 프로세스를 운용할 수 있다. 주로 국내 LP로 펀드를 구성해온 일본 중소형 운용사는 Lazard CL이나 EQT 직영보다 ‘미쓰이스미토모신탁·Hunter Point Capital’식 제휴를 통해 매수자 집중에 접근할 수 있다.

다만 이 논거의 적용 범위는 한정적이다. 크로스보더 거래, 중간 티켓 사이즈, 긴 호흡 맨데이트를 운용하는 아시아 매도자에게 가장 필요한 자문 특성이 있다. 두터운 아시아 관계망, 작은 티켓에 긴 프로세스 호흡을 감당할 의지, 그리고 모회사 플랫폼의 이해상충에서 자유로움이다. 이 세 가지를 모두 갖춘 자문사 풀은 지난 5년 어느 시점보다도 좁아져 있다. 이 조건에 부합하는 맨데이트에서 자문 벤치는 통합 이후 실제로 얇아졌다. 반면 그 바깥의 맨데이트에서는 통합의 영향이 대체로 제한적이다.

매도자의 다섯 가지 점검

2026~2027년에는 자문사 선택이 매수자 접촉보다 앞단으로 이동했다. 의사결정은 이제 프로세스 시작 이전에 마무리된다. 통합 이후 환경에 맞춰 다섯 가지 점검 기준을 다시 짠다.

첫째, 아시아 네트워크의 깊이는 시니어 자문역 단위로 가늠한다. Campbell Lutyens의 아시아 영향력은 몇몇 이름난 시니어 자문역에 집중돼 있었다. 매도자가 던질 실무 질문은 분명하다. 이들 가운데 누가 2027년까지 Lazard CL에 남고, 누가 EQT 직영 세컨더리, Jefferies, 골드만 자산운용 PCA, 또는 새로 짜이는 아시아 토종 플랫폼에서 비슷한 자리를 차지할 것인가.

둘째, 모회사 플랫폼 전반의 이해상충 노출을 구조적으로 점검한다. Lazard 산하의 Lazard CL은 Lazard 본체의 더 넓은 기업 자문 업무와 정보 차단벽(Chinese Wall) 이슈가 발생할 여지가 있다. EQT 산하의 EQT 직영 세컨더리도 EQT의 1차 펀드 LP들과 정보 차단벽 이슈를 안게 된다. ILPA가 갱신한 컨티뉴에이션 펀드 이해상충 가이드라인(4월 격주 브리핑 참조)은 절차적 기준을 한 단계 끌어올렸다. 통합 이후 매도자가 던져야 할 질문은 두 갈래다. 절차적 대응만으로 충분한가. 아니면 잠재적 매수자와 모회사 차원에서 접점이 있는 플랫폼은 구조적으로 피해야 하는가.

셋째, 통합 과정에서 시니어 자문역이 어떻게 유지되는지를 명시적으로 따져본다. 유사 사례에서는 인수 이후 18~30개월에 걸쳐 시니어 자문 인력이 빠져나가는 흐름이 반복적으로 관찰됐다. 자문사가 이 통합 시기 안에 있을 경우, 2026~2027년에 12~24개월 프로세스를 운용할 아시아 매도자는 진행 도중 시니어 접점을 최소한 한 명 잃을 것을 각오해야 한다.

넷째, 작은 아시아 티켓에 자문 자원을 얼마나 투입할 의지가 있는지는 결국 플랫폼 구조의 함수다. 고정비 부담이 큰 기관 플랫폼 안에서 작은 티켓 아시아 맨데이트가 매출에서 차지하는 비중은 독립사보다 작아진다. 자연히 시니어 자문역의 시간 배분도 달라질 수 있다. 2억 달러 규모의 한국 LP 주도 프로세스를 예로 들어 보자. 그 수수료 경제학은 Lazard CL 안에 있을 때와 독립 Campbell Lutyens일 때가 다르다. 그리고 이 차이는 계약서 문언에 늘 드러나지는 않는 방식으로 프로세스의 깊이를 좌우한다.

다섯째, 자문사 모회사와 잠재 매수자 진영이 어떻게 겹치는가가 마지막 점검 항목이다. Lazard CL이 자문하는 프로세스에서 매수자 진영이 Lazard 본체의 1차 클라이언트와 겹친다면, Jefferies가 자문하는 프로세스와는 이해상충 구조 자체가 달라진다. 따라서 매도자는 자문사를 정하기 전에 자신이 겨냥하는 매수자 그룹을 자문사 모회사 플랫폼의 노출 범위와 겹쳐서 살펴야 한다.

다섯 번째 축

이로써 이 시리즈는 아시아 세컨더리 참가자에게 다섯 개 축으로 짜인 분석 프레임을 제공한다. 1월 1편은 ‘누가 사는가’를 짚었다. 2025년 글로벌 거래량의 71%를 체결한 15개 플랫폼이 답이었다. 2월 2편은 ‘얼마에 사는가’였다. 글로벌 LP 주도 15% 미만 할인부터 중국 기초 자산 40~50%까지 이어지는 네 지점의 아시아 가격 밴드를 그렸다. 다섯 번째 지점, 한국은 공시된 형태로 아직 드러나지 않은 추론치다. 3월 3편은 ‘어떻게 거래되는가’였다. 글로벌 플랫폼 장부와 아시아 국내 장부를 가르는 두 장부 프로세스 구조를 정리했다. 4월 4편은 ‘어느 부문인가’였다. 자체 가격 논리를 가진 평행 시장으로 떠오르는 아시아 사모 크레딧 세컨더리다. 이번 5월 5편은 ‘누가 자문하는가’다. 좁아진 독립 벤치, 통합 이후 더 두터워진 기관 층, 그리고 아직 다져지는 중인 아시아 토종 역량이 그 답이다.

자문사 선택은 이제 앞선 네 가지 결정 모두의 윗단계에 자리한다. 한국 GP가 어떤 매수자 진영에 닿는지는 자문사가 가진 관계망에 달려 있다. 비교 가격으로 무엇을 테이블에 올릴지는 자문사가 끌어낼 수 있는 최근 거래 네트워크에 좌우된다. 프로세스 설계도 마찬가지다. 글로벌 플랫폼 장부로 갈지, 아시아 국내 장부로 갈지, 두 장부를 함께 갈지는 자문사가 양쪽에서 쌓은 경험이 결정한다. 부문 정의(PE 세컨더리, 크레딧 세컨더리, 스폰서 간 세컨더리)는 자문사의 상품별 인수 역량이 가른다.

결국 자문사를 고른다는 것은 이후의 모든 결정이 흘러갈 큰 틀을 고른다는 뜻이다. 단순한 인력 배치 선택이 아니라 그보다 훨씬 윗단의 의사결정이다. 다섯 축은 서로 맞물려 작동하고, 그 맞물림은 자문사를 매개로 일어난다. 통합 이후의 자문 환경이 그 맞물림의 결을 정한다.

하반기 변곡점

하반기에는 이 논거를 확인하거나 한정짓는 세 가지 변곡점이 기다린다.

첫 번째 변곡점은 Lazard CL의 거래 종결이다. 규제 당국 승인이 일정대로 진행되고 발표대로 2026년 하반기에 통합 법인이 출범하면, 통합은 발표 단계에서 운영 단계로 넘어간다. 두 번째 변곡점은 거래 종결 이후 처음 공개될 Lazard CL의 아시아 맨데이트다. 그 자문 맨데이트의 구조—프로세스 설계, 매수자 그룹, 수수료 조건, 이해상충 관리 프로토콜—가 첫 번째 관찰 가능한 단서가 된다. 통합 이후의 자문 환경이 실무에서 아시아 매도자를 어떻게 다루는지를 보여주는 단서다. 세 번째 변곡점은 하반기에 추가적인 최상위 세컨더리 자문사 통합이 나오는지 여부다. 후보군은 Houlihan Lokey, Greenhill, Park Hill, Eaton Partners다. 만약 하반기에 세 번째 통합 발표가 나온다면 이 논거는 4개월짜리 사건에서 지속적 구조 변화로 굳어진다. 그렇지 않다면 1·2분기 2026의 일시적 특성으로 한정된다.

4월 30일 발표는 며칠 전이다. 통합은 아직 시작되지 않았다. 거래 종결 이후 첫 아시아 맨데이트도 아직 공개되지 않았다. 지금이 바로 그 변곡점이다. 구조적 불확실성이 가장 높고, 분석 프레임이 2026~2027년 프로세스를 짜는 참가자에게 가장 절실한 시점이다. Lazard CL의 첫 아시아 프로세스가 체결될 무렵이면 그 안의 자문 환경은 이미 형성돼 있을 것이다. 따라서 앞으로 8~12개월 사이에 아시아 매도자가 내리는 결정은 이미 달라진 자문 환경 안에서 이뤄지는 셈이다.

좁아진 벤치, 아직 무르익지 않은 시장

아시아 세컨더리 참가자에게 2026년은 두 시장이 동시에 재편되는 한 해였다. PE 세컨더리 시장은 매수자, 가격, 프로세스, 그리고 이제는 자문에 이르기까지 단계마다 모습을 바꾸는 중이다. 크레딧 세컨더리 시장은 별도의 매수자 진영, 가격 논리, 벤치마크 흐름을 가진 평행 시장으로 자리를 잡아가고 있다. 자문사 통합은 운영 환경 전체를 다섯 번째 축으로 묶어낸다. 이 다섯 축 안에서 2026~2027년 맨데이트를 다루는 매도자·매수자·자문사는 2024년의 시각을 그대로 끌고 가는 쪽보다 시장을 한층 정확히 읽는다.

자문 벤치는 좁아졌다. 시장은 아직 무르익지 않았다. 두 현실이 어긋난 채 함께 흘러간다. 2027년까지 프로세스를 이끌어갈 아시아 매도자는 결국 이 비대칭을 끌어안고 자기 자리를 직접 잡아야 한다.

Tags: Saint-Clair, Secondaries, Korea, Japan, China, LP-Led-Secondary, GP-Led-Secondary, Continuation-Vehicle, M&A, Named-Transaction

Saint Clair Market Intelligence · 그라운드 트루스: 세컨더리 · 2026 시리즈 제5편. 〈좁아지는 매수자 진영〉(2026년 1월), 〈벌어지는 가격 밴드〉(2026년 2월), 〈두 개의 장부〉(2026년 3월), 〈크레딧 프런티어〉(2026년 4월)에 이은 다섯 번째 글.

참고자료

• Secondaries Investor, Lazard to expand in infra and credit with Campbell Lutyens acquisition (2026년 4월 30일)

• EQT Group, EQT to combine with Coller Capital to enter secondaries (2026년 1월 22일)

• Bloomberg, Ping An seeks to sell USD 1 billion software-focused PE assets (2026년 4월 13일)

• Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Asia private capital fourth-quarter data and trends (2026년 1월)

• Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Asia private capital quarterly analysis: Q1 2026 (2026년 4월 15일)

• Jefferies, 2025 global secondary market review (2026년 1월)

• Coller Capital, Secondaries in 2026: capitalising on the wave (2026년 4월)

• Bain & Company, Asia-Pacific private equity report 2026 (2026년 3월)

• Campbell Lutyens, 2025 secondaries market flash report (2026년 1월 27일)

• Secondaries Investor, Manulife buying infra CVs, secondaries to address low DPI (2026년 4월 30일)

• Private Equity Wire, LP concerns mount over conflicts in continuation-vehicle process (2026년 4월 27일)

고지: 본 글은 정보 제공을 목적으로 하며, 투자 자문이나 권유에 해당하지 않습니다. 모든 의사결정은 독립적인 조사와 자격을 갖춘 자문사와의 협의를 바탕으로 이뤄져야 합니다.

Saint Clair 소개: Saint Clair는 유럽과 아시아 사이의 크로스보더 자본 인프라를 설계하고 구축한다. 접근이 희소한 곳에 접근을 제안하고, 구조가 부재한 곳에 구조를 만들어낸다. 2016년 설립.

Saint Clair Capital · Ground Truth | May 2026

On 30 April, Lazard, Inc. announced agreement to acquire Campbell Lutyens for approximately USD 575 million in base consideration: USD 460 million at close, USD 115 million deferred, and up to USD 85 million in earn-out, taking the maximum to USD 660 million. Closing is expected in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. The combined entity will operate as Lazard CL, run by co-CEOs Holcombe Green and Gordon Bajnai, with approximately 280 advisory professionals and a 2027 revenue run-rate guidance of USD 500 million. Campbell Lutyens has Asian operating offices in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Melbourne — the densest independent secondaries-adviser footprint on the continent now coming inside an institutional platform.

The transaction matters specifically for Asian sellers. Campbell Lutyens has advised on more than USD 100 billion of secondary transactions and helped raise over USD 190 billion across the past two years. A material share of that activity has run through the firm’s Asian network: the mandates that connect Korean GPs to North American buyer syndicates, Japanese GPs to global continuation-vehicle anchors, and Chinese institutional sellers to international placement chains. From the second half of 2026, that capability operates inside Lazard’s institutional architecture rather than as an independent firm.

The first four articles in this series described the Asian PE secondary market from four angles: buyer-side concentration, pricing-side dispersion, two-books process architecture, and a credit secondary market forming as a parallel segment. The frame has now acquired a fifth angle. This article argues that a structural feature shaping all four — who advises Asian sellers — has changed materially in 2026, and that adviser selection now sits as a fifth axis alongside them. Asian sellers approaching continuation-vehicle and LP-led processes in 2026–2027 will face an adviser-selection decision that did not exist in 2024.

The January precedent

On 22 January, EQT announced agreement to combine with Coller Capital. The transaction value was USD 3.2 billion in EQT shares plus up to USD 500 million contingent, with USD 50 billion of secondaries assets at close and an explicit Asian deployment mandate. The structure is different from Lazard × Campbell Lutyens. EQT acquired a buy-side platform; Lazard acquired an advisory firm. Treating them as a single consolidation pattern collapses two distinct phenomena.

The underlying source is the same. Secondaries-specialist intermediation is institutionalising. The buyer-side variant moves capital from independent fund manager to integrated platform. The adviser-side variant moves advisory expertise from independent firm to integrated bank. Both reduce the pool of specialised, independently-governed actors at the top tier of the secondaries market. For Asian sellers approaching 2026–2027 processes, the operating consequence is similar: fewer points of independent intermediation at the top of the market.

Together, the two transactions describe a four-month sequence in which two of the three top-tier independent secondaries-specialist firms historically active on Asian mandates were absorbed into larger institutional parents. Jefferies remains the principal independent investment-bank competitor on Asian secondary work. Greenhill, Park Hill, Houlihan Lokey and Eaton Partners hold smaller positions in a thinning second tier. The independent layer in 2026 is structurally narrower than it was in 2025, and the consolidation has happened faster than any participant in the market projected at the start of the year.

The asymmetry

Asia accounted for approximately 4% of 2025 global LP-led secondary volume — roughly USD 5 billion of the USD 125 billion global LP-led total, per Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer’s January data. HSF Kramer’s Q1 2026 update flagged a “particularly pronounced decline” in Asian secondaries fundraising even as global secondary turnover hit a record USD 240 billion (Jefferies’ methodology, distinct from Campbell Lutyens’ USD 225 billion print used earlier in this series). Bain’s 2026 APAC report records regional secondary value rising 41% year-on-year, but from a base that places the region well below its share of regional PE AUM.

Asian advisory capacity is being institutionalised before Asian volume has scaled. The market that most needed independent advisory infrastructure, where small ticket sizes and jurisdictional complexity favoured deep relationship capital and extended process timelines, is the market in which top-tier independent infrastructure is consolidating fastest. The structural sequence is inverted from the usual pattern, where transaction volume drives intermediary scale-up. In Asian secondaries, the intermediaries are scaling, then institutionalising, ahead of the volume.

The remaining bench

The post-consolidation advisory layer for Asian secondary mandates falls into three tiers.

The institutional platforms now include Lazard CL (closing H2 2026), EQT secondaries direct (post-Coller integration), Goldman Sachs Asset Management Petershill private capital advisory, JPMorgan Private Capital Markets, Evercore Private Capital Advisory, and a small set of bulge-bracket investment-bank teams. These are deep capital structures with parent governance regimes; their availability for Asian secondary mandates depends on parent-platform conflict architecture as well as on capacity allocation.

The remaining independents are headed by Jefferies, with Greenhill, Park Hill, Houlihan Lokey and Eaton Partners in the second tier. These firms operate without parent-conflict overlays; their constraint is bench depth rather than governance complexity, and their willingness to underwrite long process timelines on small Asian tickets is shaped by fee economics rather than by integration calendars.

The Asian-domestic layer is nascent. Korean financial-group-backed advisory teams, Japanese asset-management-aligned secondary platforms and Singapore-based independents are all in formation, but none yet operates at top-tier scale on cross-border Asian secondary mandates with international buyer syndicates. The cohort exists. Its capability is still being built.

The Asian sell-side decision in 2026–2027 will be made inside this map. The choice now sits among three options: an institutional platform with a parent governance regime, an investment-bank independent with broader investment-banking exposures, and an Asian-domestic adviser whose top-tier network for international buyer outreach is still being built. Independent specialists with deep Asian networks have narrowed by two over four months.

Leadership continuity and the integration window

Lazard CL leadership has stated that the advisory practice will retain its character through integration. Holcombe Green and Gordon Bajnai remain as co-CEOs of the combined entity. Comparable bank-acquires-adviser transactions, including Park Hill at Blackstone and various M&A advisory businesses inside investment banks, show that integration dynamics typically take 24 to 36 months to produce visible commercial conflicts or culture shifts. In the immediate window after closing, the day-to-day advisory experience for clients running active processes is unlikely to change materially.

The structural argument made here addresses the longer horizon. For a Korean GP launching a process in late 2026, the practical question may be whether the senior bench they have engaged remains in place through completion. The longer-horizon question is whether the platform’s parent-conflict regime, fee economics and resource allocation patterns continue to support the small-ticket, long-timeline Asian mandates that defined Campbell Lutyens’ Asian work as those constraints harden through integration. That question is open. The answer depends on individual integration choices that have not yet been made and on how the parent’s other businesses evolve through the same window.

The domestic alternative

Asian sellers may not need top-tier global independent advice to clear processes. The market is small enough that a single specialist or a thinning second tier may serve it adequately. For some segments, Asian-domestic advisory capability can substitute. A Korean small-cap GP with strong domestic LP relationships and a Korean-language fund document set may run a process more efficiently through KVIC-aligned domestic advisers than through a global platform. A Japanese mid-market manager with primarily domestic LP composition may reach buyer concentration through Sumitomo Mitsui Trust × Hunter Point Capital-type tie-ups rather than through Lazard CL or EQT secondaries direct.

The thesis is narrower than universal substitution. The specific advisory characteristics most useful to Asian sellers running cross-border, mid-ticket, long-timeline mandates — deep Asian relationships, willingness to take long process timelines on small tickets, freedom from parent-platform conflicts — are now concentrated in a narrower universe of providers than at any point in the past five years. For mandates that fit those characteristics, the post-consolidation bench is materially thinner. For mandates outside them, the consolidation is largely irrelevant.

What the seller does differently

Adviser selection in 2026–2027 has moved upstream of buyer outreach. The decision now sits before the launch of a process. Five criteria recalibrate to the post-consolidation environment.

Depth of Asian relationships is measured at the senior-banker level. Campbell Lutyens’ Asian footprint was concentrated in named senior advisers; the practical question for sellers is which of those advisers remain at Lazard CL through 2027 and which establish equivalent positions inside EQT secondaries direct, Jefferies, Goldman AM PCA or new Asian-domestic platforms.

Conflict-of-interest exposure across the parent platform requires structural review. Lazard CL inside Lazard creates potential information walls against Lazard’s broader corporate advisory work; EQT secondaries direct inside EQT creates potential information walls against EQT’s primary fund clients. ILPA’s renewed continuation-vehicle conflicts guidance (cited in the April fortnightly briefing) raises the procedural bar; the post-consolidation question is whether procedural response is sufficient or whether Asian sellers should structurally avoid platforms with parent exposures to likely buyers.

Senior-advisory retention dynamics through integration warrant explicit underwriting. Comparable transactions have produced 18-to-30-month departure cycles for senior advisers post-acquisition. Asian sellers running 12-to-24-month processes through 2026–2027 should expect to lose at least one senior contact mid-process if their adviser is inside an integration window.

Fee-economic willingness on small Asian tickets is a function of platform structure. Inside an institutional platform with fixed cost structures, small-ticket Asian mandates may receive different senior attention than inside an independent firm where they constituted a larger share of revenue. The fee economics of a USD 200 million Korean LP-led process inside Lazard CL differ from the same process inside an independent Campbell Lutyens, and the difference shapes process depth in ways that are not always captured in the engagement letter.

Alignment between adviser parent and likely buyer cohort closes the criteria set. A process advised by Lazard CL where the likely buyer cohort overlaps with Lazard’s primary clients carries different conflict architecture from a process advised by Jefferies. Sellers should map their target buyer set against the parent-platform exposures of their adviser before mandating.

The interaction with the prior axes

The series now provides Asian secondary participants with a five-axis analytical frame. Article 1 in January described WHO buys: fifteen platform firms executing 71% of 2025 global volume. Article 2 in February described WHAT it costs: a four-point Asian pricing band running from sub-15% global LP-led discount to 40–50% on Chinese-underlying paper, with the Korean point as an inferred fifth still to emerge in disclosed form. Article 3 in March described HOW it transacts: two-books process architecture separating global platform and domestic Asian channels. Article 4 in April described WHICH segment: Asian private credit secondaries forming as a parallel market with its own pricing logic. Article 5 in May describes WHO advises: a narrowed independent bench, a thicker post-consolidation institutional layer, and a still-building Asian-domestic capability.

Adviser selection now sits upstream of all four prior decisions. The buyer cohort a Korean GP reaches depends on the adviser’s relationships. The pricing comparators tabled depend on which network of recent transactions the adviser can cite. The process design — global platform book, Asian sovereign book, or some combination — depends on the adviser’s experience across both. The segment definition (PE secondary, credit secondary, sponsor-to-sponsor secondary) depends on the adviser’s underwriting capability across instruments.

A seller selecting an adviser is selecting the architecture inside which all subsequent decisions will be made — far upstream of tactical staffing. The five axes are interdependent. They interact through the adviser, and the post-consolidation architecture shapes how that interaction runs.

The H2 2026 inflection

Three tests through the second half of 2026 will confirm or qualify the thesis.

The first is the closing of Lazard CL. If regulatory approvals proceed on schedule and the combined entity launches in H2 2026 as announced, the consolidation passes from announced to operational. The second is the first disclosed Lazard CL Asian mandate post-close. The mandate’s structure (process design, buyer set, fee terms, conflict-management protocols) will be the first observable evidence of how the post-consolidation architecture handles Asian sellers in practice. The third is whether further top-tier secondaries-adviser consolidation activity emerges in H2 2026. Houlihan Lokey, Greenhill, Park Hill and Eaton Partners are the candidate independents. A third announcement in H2 would harden the thesis from a four-month sequence to a sustained structural shift; absence would qualify it as a Q1–Q2 2026 feature.

The 30 April announcement is recent. The integration has not begun. The first post-consolidation Asian mandates have not been disclosed. The article publishes during the inflection — the period when structural uncertainty is highest and the framework matters most for participants designing 2026–2027 processes. By the time the first Lazard CL Asian process clears, the architecture inside which it cleared will already have formed. The decisions Asian sellers make in the next eight to twelve months will be made inside an advisory environment that has already changed.

Closing

Asian secondary participants have spent 2026 reading two markets reorganising at once. The PE secondary market has been reorganising on the buyer side, the pricing side, the process side, and now the advisory side. The credit secondary market has been forming as a parallel architecture with its own buyer cohort, pricing logic and benchmark sequence. The advisory consolidation is the fifth axis around which the operating environment is now legible. Sellers, buyers and advisers approaching 2026–2027 mandates inside this five-axis frame will read the market more accurately than those who approach it as a continuation of 2024.

The bench has compressed. The market has not yet scaled. Both facts are operating simultaneously, and Asian sellers running processes through 2027 will hold their positions inside that asymmetry.

Saint Clair Market Intelligence · Ground Truth: Secondaries · Article 5 of the 2026 series. Follows “The Thinning Buyer Base” (January), “The Widening Band” (February), “The Two Books” (March), and “The Credit Frontier” (April).

Sources

• Secondaries Investor, Lazard to expand in infra and credit with Campbell Lutyens acquisition (30 April 2026)

• EQT Group, EQT to combine with Coller Capital to enter secondaries (22 January 2026)

• Bloomberg, Ping An seeks to sell USD 1 billion software-focused PE assets (13 April 2026)

• Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Asia private capital fourth-quarter data and trends (January 2026)

• Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Asia private capital quarterly analysis: Q1 2026 (15 April 2026)

• Jefferies, 2025 global secondary market review (January 2026)

• Coller Capital, Secondaries in 2026: capitalising on the wave (April 2026)

• Bain & Company, Asia-Pacific private equity report 2026 (March 2026)

• Campbell Lutyens, 2025 secondaries market flash report (27 January 2026)

• Secondaries Investor, Manulife buying infra CVs, secondaries to address low DPI (30 April 2026)

• Private Equity Wire, LP concerns mount over conflicts in continuation-vehicle process (27 April 2026)

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

.Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | May 2026

Every technology ecosystem needs physical space. Not the metaphorical kind — the literal kind. Office buildings where engineers can sit. Incubation hubs where startups can afford rent. Data centres where servers can run. The absence of this infrastructure is, in many emerging markets, the binding constraint: the talent exists, the ideas exist, but there is nowhere to put them. Jeevan Gnanam’s contribution to Sri Lanka’s technology sector begins with the most elemental of acts — providing a building.

The Family and the Land

The Gnanam family story is itself a study in what is possible in Sri Lanka, and what it costs. Jeevan’s grandfather, A.Y.S. Gnanam — later honoured with the title Deshamanya — arrived from Tamil Nadu in the 1930s and built what would become one of Sri Lanka’s largest industrial conglomerates. St. Anthony’s Group, spanning cement, PVC, roofing, textiles, solar, and hydropower, was a first-generation achievement in a country where Tamil entrepreneurs navigated complexities that their Sinhalese counterparts did not face. That the family built what it built, where it built it, is not a footnote. It is context.

Jeevan is the third generation. He studied economics and business in the United States before returning to Sri Lanka in 2007 to lead St. Anthony’s Industries, modernising the family business while scanning for the opportunity that would become his own.

He found it in a gap. Sri Lanka’s IT sector was growing, but it had nowhere to grow into. Office space for technology companies was scarce, expensive, and inadequate. Jeevan persuaded the St. Anthony’s board to allocate sixteen acres of underutilised family land on Baseline Road in Colombo for an IT park. The board’s initial reaction was scepticism. The land was generating revenue from existing industrial use. Betting it on a technology park — in a country where technology parks did not yet exist — was, by the standards of a manufacturing conglomerate, speculative.

Orion City

The bet paid. Orion City, launched in 2007 with thirty thousand square feet of office space, has grown to one million square feet. The campus now houses more than forty international technology companies — Virtusa, IFS, Synopsys, among others — and employs more than eight thousand people on site. Orion Towers, a twenty-two-storey expansion with LEED Gold certification, added half a million square feet of additional capacity.

Virtusa was the anchor tenant — a validation that attracted others. The economics were straightforward: a purpose-built technology campus, at competitive rates, in central Colombo, with the infrastructure that international firms required. The combined revenue generated by the Gnanam group’s technology and industrial operations exceeds $55 million. But the more consequential figure is the eight thousand people who come to work there every day. Orion City did not create the talent. It created the place where the talent could be employed at scale.

Hatch

When Gnanam became chairman of SLASSCOM — Sri Lanka’s IT industry body — in 2018, he identified a second gap. Orion City served established firms. Startups needed something different: affordable space, mentorship, access to investors, and the density of peers that accelerates learning. In 2018, he co-founded Hatch with Brindha Selvadurai-Gnanam and Nathan Sivagananathan — a sixty-thousand-square-foot coworking and incubation space in Colombo Fort, later expanded with a branch in Jaffna.

Hatch now houses over 115 startups and more than a thousand individuals. It runs eighteen incubator and accelerator programmes, including AccelerateHER — Sri Lanka’s first accelerator for female founders, in partnership with the US Department of State — and HatchX, the country’s first fintech accelerator, launched with the Lankan Angel Network and the Ford Foundation.

In 2021, Hatch won Best Co-Working Space in the World at the Global Startup Awards — the first South Asian organisation to receive the honour, selected from eighteen thousand nominees. The award is notable not for what it says about Hatch, but for what it says about the ecosystem: a coworking space in Colombo, in a country that had recently endured an economic crisis, was judged the best in the world by an international panel.

The AI Chapter

Gnanam’s most recent ventures extend the infrastructure logic into the digital layer. Veracity AI, founded in 2018, is a professional services and product development firm specialising in data science, machine learning, and computer vision — now part of Veracity Group, with approximately three hundred staff serving clients across Australia, Singapore, Norway, India, the United States, and the Middle East.

SpectrifyAI, co-founded in 2020, applies spectral scanning and machine learning to agricultural products — analysing the chemical composition of tea, spices, and soil in real time. The inspiration, characteristically, came from an unexpected direction: Gnanam’s interest in astronomy led him to wonder whether the spectral analysis used to determine the chemical composition of distant planets could be applied to tea leaves. It could.

These ventures are early-stage. Whether they reach the scale of Orion City or Hatch is an open question. But the pattern is consistent: identify infrastructure that the ecosystem lacks, build it, then move to the next layer.

The Through-Line

Gnanam is not a software engineer. He is not a product builder in the conventional sense. What he builds is the space — physical, institutional, digital — in which other people build products. Orion City gave established firms a campus. Hatch gave startups a home. The Lankan Angel Network, which he co-founded, gave investors a structure. SLASSCOM, which he chaired, gave the industry a voice. Veracity AI and SpectrifyAI are, in their own way, infrastructure too — capabilities that other companies will eventually build upon.

The founders profiled elsewhere in this series built companies. Gnanam built the rooms those companies work in. The distinction matters. In an ecosystem where the binding constraint has historically been infrastructure rather than talent, the person who removes that constraint enables everything that follows.

Sources:

• Echelon, “How I Did It: Jeevan Gnanam”: https://echelon.lk/how-i-did-it-jeevan-gnanam/

• Echelon, NE100 Profile — Jeevan Gnanam: https://ne100.echelon.lk/jeevan-gnanam

• Orion City: https://www.orioncity.lk/

• Hatch: https://hatch.lk/

• Daily FT, “Hatch creates South Asian history with Best Co-Working Space in the World award”: https://www.ft.lk/front-page/Hatch-creates-South-Asian-history-with-Best-Co-Working-Space-in-the-World-award/44-726501

• The Sunday Times, “Jeevan Gnanam takes over as SLASSCOM chairman”: https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180708/business-times/jeevan-gnanam-takes-over-as-slasscom-chairman-301277.html

• The Morning, “Blending agriculture and tech for a new future: Jeevan Gnanam on SpectrifyAI”: https://www.themorning.lk/blending-agriculture-and-tech-for-a-new-future-jeevan-gnanam-on-his-newest-venture-spectrifyai/

• Wikipedia, “A. Y. S. Gnanam”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Y._S._Gnanam

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | saintclair.asia | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair Capital · Ground Truth | April 2026

On 1 April, Metcold Holdings, a Chinese cold-chain logistics borrower, failed to repay a USD 27.5 million principal instalment inside BlackRock’s APAC Private Credit Opportunities Fund II. A further USD 12 million of accrued interest was unpaid. The original facility was USD 52.5 million. The fund size is USD 435 million. Bloomberg and Caproasia reported the default on 14 and 16 April, with BlackRock itself publicly positioning the same day that private credit tumult represented a market-share opportunity.

One borrower, one facility, one missed payment. The data point is small on its own terms. Its significance is that it is the first realised loss benchmark inside a major Asia-focused private credit fund, and it will be priced into the 30 June NAV marks. The marks themselves will be the first occasion on which Asian private credit fund NAVs are reset against realised default experience rather than modelled-and-reserved assumptions. For the secondary market being built around these funds, that is the establishing reference.

The first three articles in this series covered the Asian PE secondary market from three angles: buyer-side concentration, pricing-side dispersion, and process-side two-books architecture. Taken together, they describe the operating environment for PE secondary allocation through 2026. This fourth article argues that a second Asian secondary market is now forming in parallel, and that it requires separate treatment. Asian private credit secondaries are a different asset class from Asian PE secondaries, with different pricing logic, a different disclosure regime, and a different buyer cohort in formation. The Metcold default is the point at which that separation becomes operationally visible.

Why credit is a different market

Four structural features separate Asian private credit secondaries from Asian PE secondaries.

The underlying asset is different. PE secondaries trade stakes in partnerships that own equity positions in companies. Credit secondaries trade stakes in partnerships that own loans to companies. Equity has no defined maturity and no contractual cashflow; debt has both. A PE secondary is a bet on multiple expansion and eventual exit. A credit secondary is a bet on remaining coupon and principal return against a defined amortisation schedule. The two instruments price differently and fail differently.

Pricing logic follows from the instrument. PE secondaries anchor to discount-to-NAV, with the NAV itself constructed from GP valuations that are subject to the marking conventions described in Article 2. Credit secondaries anchor to yield-to-maturity pricing, discount-to-par, and, post-default, loss-given-default assumptions built from realised recoveries. The pricing vocabulary is different, the reference points are different, and the benchmark-setting moments are different. A PE CV anchors its pricing when the anchor investor commits. A credit secondary prices off disclosed default and recovery data at portfolio level, and the benchmark sequence accumulates across disclosures.

Disclosure convention is the third difference. PE secondary transactions disclose pricing at clearance, and rarely disclose underlying asset-level performance in the process. Credit funds are forced into disclosure by default events: the creditor committee process, the workout, and the eventual recovery produce a public record of loss that shapes pricing for every subsequent secondary transaction in the same fund and often in comparable funds. The Metcold disclosure through Bloomberg and Caproasia is a case in point: the loss is on the public record before any secondary transaction against APCO II has occurred, and any subsequent LP-led or CV process will price against that record. Credit secondaries carry their pricing history in public from the moment of default. PE secondaries operate on a different disclosure clock.

Buyer cohort is the fourth difference, and the most consequential. PE secondaries are bought by the fifteen-firm platform cohort Campbell Lutyens measured. Credit secondaries are bought by a partly-overlapping but structurally distinct cohort: credit-specialist platforms (Ares, Apollo, Blackstone credit, Ardian credit, Intermediate Capital), and, emergently, by Asian institutional buyers whose credit underwriting capability is being built this year. The overlap is real: Ares and Blackstone appear in both markets. The distinction is also real: credit underwriting requires different analytical capacity and different institutional approval, and the Korean asset-management and insurance-company buy-side is entering credit as its own direct institutional track.

The buyer cohort in formation

The buyer cohort for Asian private credit secondaries is partly-overlapping with the PE cohort but structurally distinct, and it is assembling in real time. Global credit-specialist platforms are raising and deploying capital at scale; Korean institutional buyers are building credit-secondary capability from scratch. Together, the two layers constitute the parallel-market buyer universe.

Ares closed its second North American private credit continuation vehicle at USD 1.7 billion on 30 March, anchored by Ares Credit Secondaries, with Cleary Gottlieb acting for the lead and Antares Capital as the sponsor. The transaction supplies a direct comparator for Asian credit CV pricing: non-Asian in geography, but the most recent cleared disclosed credit CV at scale, and a quantifiable benchmark that Asian processes will be measured against.

Blackstone closed its opportunistic credit fund at USD 10 billion on 7 April. The fund carries a global mandate, and the capital overhang it creates extends into Asian opportunities, establishing a pricing floor for Asian private credit secondaries. A USD 10 billion opportunistic credit fund cannot deploy exclusively through primary origination; a share of the capital will seek secondary routes, and the price at which it is willing to clear will shape the bottom of the Asian credit secondary band.

Samsung Asset Management is the first Korean asset-management-company to signal credit secondaries and co-investment entry publicly, reported by Private Debt Investor in April. The signal marks positioning. A first transaction is still pending. But the positioning itself is the evidence: a major Korean AM is building a dedicated credit-secondary capability from scratch, with its own staffing and its own mandate. This is the institutional signature the parallel-market thesis requires.

Ardian, Apollo, Goldman AIMS and others hold Asian credit exposure within broader mandates, and will participate where processes fit. The platform layer is therefore real but partial. The cohort that will determine whether Asian private credit secondaries clear as a parallel market is the combination of dedicated credit platforms on the global side and emerging Asian institutional buyers on the regional side. The second layer is still thin. Its thickening is the test the thesis turns on.

The Korean layer

The Korean institutional build-out has three elements in motion.

The FSC established an AI-based credit rating task force on 9 April, a regulatory signal that NAV-marking infrastructure for private credit is moving to rule-based discount construction. This matters for secondaries because rule-based marks reduce the dispersion between GP valuation and buyer underwriting, and the space between the two is where secondary discounts live. Tighter rule-based marks will compress the discount envelope for Korean private credit secondaries specifically and establish a pricing reference that spans Korean credit CVs and LP-led transactions.

The BDC regime became effective on 17 March, with forty-two licensed managers and the first products expected in Q2. Most first-cohort BDCs will follow venture mandates, but the regime’s 60% venture allocation rule leaves room for credit strategies, and a subset will carry private credit mandates. When the first credit-exposed BDC lists on KOSDAQ, it will establish a public pricing reference for Korean private credit portfolios that currently trades in private markets only.

Samsung AM’s positioning completes the triangle. A regulator building NAV infrastructure, a new listed vehicle class, and the first major domestic AM entering credit secondaries — three elements of a cohort that did not exist in 2025 and is operationally pre-positioned for 2026 deployment.

The limit of the argument is worth stating plainly. Korean credit-secondary buy-side is at the positional stage. The FSC task force has yet to produce rules. The BDC regime has yet to produce product. Samsung AM has yet to clear a transaction. If the three elements fail to move from positioning to execution through H2 2026, the parallel-market argument weakens. The Korean layer is what separates this thesis from a restatement of global platform concentration; its operational realisation is what the thesis rests on.

What the allocator does differently

The operational discipline the parallel-market frame requires is separation.

Buy-side allocators with Asian private credit exposures should staff credit secondaries as a dedicated function, separate from PE secondaries. The analytical capability differs: credit underwriting calls for loan documentation review, covenant analysis, workout experience and recovery modelling, none of which PE secondary teams typically carry. Institutions that treat credit as a tactical extension of PE secondary capacity will under-diligence credit transactions and over-apply PE pricing conventions.

Underwriting frameworks should run against credit-specific benchmarks. The Ares/Antares USD 1.7 billion CV is the current North American reference. The APCO II 30 June marks will be the first Asia-specific reference. A Korean credit CV or LP-led process priced against the ADIA/CDH 36% PE anchor would import a convention built for a different instrument; one priced against North American credit CV discounts, absent an adjustment for Asian jurisdictional risk, would understate required spread. Credit requires its own band, constructed from credit-specific transacted prints.

Diligence priorities shift. PE secondary diligence concentrates on portfolio composition, GP track record and market risk. Credit secondary diligence concentrates on loan-by-loan workout trajectory, collateral value, covenant compliance and specifically the pattern of default resolution for the fund in question. For APCO II, the Metcold workout will produce a disclosed recovery rate. That number will be the most important single data point in any subsequent APCO II secondary underwriting exercise.

Counterparty screening follows. A Korean GP approaching a credit CV will face a different buyer universe from a Korean PE GP: the credit-specialist platforms, the emerging Korean institutional cohort, selectively the global generalist platforms. Process design should reflect that universe from the first adviser conversation. Asian credit GPs should design process against the credit buyer universe on its own terms. PE process templates require material adjustment before they transfer.

The tests

Three tests through H2 2026 will confirm or qualify the thesis.

A second Asian private credit default would materially strengthen the benchmark argument. If Metcold is a one-off and APCO II recovers to plan from here, the benchmark weakens and the broader pricing regime remains modelled. If follow-on defaults appear in APCO II or in comparable Asia-focused private credit funds (Partners Group Asia credit, KKR Asia credit, HPS Asia strategies, others), the realised-loss pricing regime hardens and the parallel-market argument strengthens.

A first Asian private credit CV disclosure with pricing terms would establish the Asian comparator to the Ares/Antares reference. The most likely candidates are BlackRock Asia-connected strategies, Partners Group Asia credit vehicles, or a first-mover Korean-domiciled CV. Whichever prints first will anchor Asian credit CV pricing for the rest of 2026.

A first Samsung AM or Korean institutional credit secondary transaction would move the Korean buy-side from positional to transactional and complete the parallel-market structural case. Without at least one clearance, the Korean layer remains hypothesis. With one, the thesis acquires an operating confirmation.

What the frame says

The credit-frontier frame is a forward-looking thesis about segment emergence. The market itself is still in formation. The evidence supporting the frame is real but thin: one default, one comparator CV, one positioning signal, one regulatory task force, one new vehicle class. Honest framing requires naming the thinness. It also requires naming the direction. Each data point carries a trajectory: the default will be followed by more defaults across Asia-focused private credit funds as 2022–2023 vintages encounter difficult underlying conditions; the comparator CV will be followed by Asian credit CVs as sponsors face the same liquidity pressures that drove the North American transaction; the Samsung AM signal will be followed by other Korean AMs and insurance companies building credit-secondary capability; the FSC task force and BDC regime will produce concrete rules and products over the next several quarters.

The 2026 Asian secondary market has become plural. Concentration on the PE buyer side, dispersion on the PE pricing side, two books on the PE process side, and now a parallel credit segment with its own forming buyer cohort, its own pricing logic, and its own benchmark sequence. Four angles, one operating environment. Allocators, sellers and advisers who underwrite all four will clear. Those who fold credit into their PE secondary framework will mis-price it in both directions: too generous on instruments that deserve tighter marks, too punitive on instruments that the new buyer cohort will pay for.

Credit’s underwriting clock and pricing logic differ structurally from PE secondaries. Asian credit secondaries price against coupon and recovery, carry defined amortisation, and clear on instrument fundamentals rather than on NAV-based discount negotiation. Duration is contractual; underwriting tolerance is longer; clearance runs closer to fundamental yield than to exit-driven multiple. The buyer cohort that ends up holding the Asian credit segment is still forming. Both credit Book One, raising term-limited credit funds against IRR targets, and credit Book Two, building domestic capability against regulatory calendars, carry mandate constraints the segment may exceed. Which extensions of the disclosed buyer base end up clearing Asian credit secondaries is a 2027 question.

The Metcold default is a small number. The market it opens is a large one.

Saint Clair Market Intelligence · Ground Truth: Secondaries · Article 4 of the 2026 series. Follows “The Thinning Buyer Base” (January), “The Widening Band” (February), and “The Two Books” (March).

Sources

• Bloomberg, BlackRock’s Asia private credit fund sees China borrower default (14 April 2026)

• Caproasia, BlackRock USD 435m APAC Private Credit Opportunities Fund II suffers first default (16 April 2026)

• Bloomberg, BlackRock sees private credit tumult as way to take market share (14 April 2026)

• Antares Capital, Antares closes USD 1.7 billion private credit continuation vehicle led by Ares (30 March 2026)

• Cleary Gottlieb, Ares in Antares USD 1.7 billion private credit CV (30 March 2026)

• Private Debt Investor, Samsung Asset Management eyes credit secondaries and co-investments (April 2026)

• Blackstone, Opportunistic credit fund USD 10 billion final close (7 April 2026)

• Dechert, GP-led secondaries and continuation vehicles boost DPI (sustained 2025–2026)

• Bloomberg, BlackRock gets nod to extend Asia credit fund by another year (20 January 2026)

• Bloomberg, BlackRock stumbles in Asia private credit push, forcing rethink (26 November 2025 through April 2026)

• Seoul Economic Daily, Korea launches BDC system this month (5 March 2026)

• Financial Services Commission, AI-based credit rating task force (9 April 2026)

• Bloomberg, Ping An seeks to sell USD 1 billion software-focused PE assets (13–14 April 2026)

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Saint Clair Capital · Ground Truth | April 2026

The fortnight produced disclosure of a shape Edition 8 did not anticipate. China Investment Corporation’s USD 1 billion US PE portfolio cleared to Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Ardian at disclosed pricing. Shinhan Asset Management launched Korea’s first Business Development Company with an explicit secondary allocation. EcoBit, an IMM-controlled platform, signed to acquire a Korean environmental asset from VL Investment in a Korean PE-to-PE secondary buyout. None of the three is a Korean domestic LP-led print. Each is a different liquidity path opening while the canonical Korean LP-led print remains absent.

CIC USD 1 Billion US PE Portfolio Cleared — First Disclosed Asian Sovereign-Seller LP-Led at Scale

Greater China · LP-led · Bloomberg, 14 April 2026

China Investment Corporation has sold a portfolio of approximately USD 1 billion in US private equity fund stakes to Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Ardian, with Evercore advising and the transaction closing in late 2025. Bloomberg disclosed the trade on 14 April. Underlying positions include vehicles managed by Blackstone, Carlyle and six other US managers. Pricing was disclosed in the same report: Goldman Sachs Asset Management acquired its share at a single-digit discount to NAV, Ardian at a double-digit discount.

The print matters on three counts. It is the first publicly disclosed Asian sovereign-seller LP-led secondary on a North American underlying at this scale. The pricing band, running from a single-digit to a double-digit discount depending on buyer, establishes a hard reference against which subsequent Asian sovereign paper will transact. The route, advised by Evercore and cleared through two global platform buyers, replicates the Nan Shan / Fubon / Ping An pattern, now extended from insurer sellers to a sovereign seller. CIC is Asia’s largest sovereign LP. A clearance reference is now in the public record.

Bloomberg

EQT BPEA IX Final Close at USD 15.6 Billion — Largest Asia-Pacific PE Fund Raised

Pan-Asian · Buy-side · EQT Group, 20 April 2026

EQT closed BPEA Private Equity Fund IX at USD 15.6 billion in total commitments (USD 14.9 billion fee-generating), oversubscribed and now the largest Asia-Pacific dedicated PE fund raised to date. Pension funds and SWFs led contributions among more than 75 new investors; the fund is already 5–10% invested.

The close lands against a 2025 Asian primary fundraising figure at a 12-year low. The two-tier dynamic continues: global incumbents concentrate dry powder while mid-sized Asian GPs face LP pressure that will produce secondary supply. EQT’s enlarged Asia portfolio will generate continuation-vehicle and LP-led opportunities across vintages now in the ground. LP access constraints in BPEA IX itself will produce primary-rejection capital seeking secondary entry.

EQT Group

Partners Group Eighth and Ninth Secondaries Programmes Close — Asia-Pacific LPs Lead, Asia Allocation Lifted

Pan-Asian · Buy-side · Secondaries Investor, 17–20 April 2026

Partners Group closed its eighth flagship PE secondaries programme above USD 9 billion, with the largest individual commitments from Asia-Pacific investors and approximately one-third of new commitments from outside Europe. The programme is already 60% committed, with 5–20% allocated to Asian underlying. The ninth programme also closed above hard cap; the firm guides that its Asian allocation has been lifted relative to prior vintages, driven by continuation-vehicle deal flow from Japanese and Korean GPs and widening discount-to-NAV on Asia-exposed portfolios.

Two reads run in parallel. Asia-Pacific LPs are increasingly significant capital providers on global secondaries programmes, consistent with appetite at Korean and Japanese institutional level. On the deployment side the Asia weight remains a minority sleeve. The eighth programme deploys mostly outside Asia; the ninth lifts Asia weight without disclosing the magnitude.

Secondaries Investor — eighth programme · Secondaries Investor — ninth programme

Cerberus / SubCom USD 2.3 Billion Single-Asset CV — Digital Infrastructure Pricing Reference

US-Global · GP-led · Alternatives Watch, 20 April 2026

Cerberus Capital Management closed a USD 2.3 billion single-asset continuation vehicle for Subsea Communications, a US-headquartered subsea fibre-optic cable systems supplier. CVC Secondary Partners led; Evercore advised; Cerberus-managed funds (including from the Supply Chain strategy) co-invested and retain controlling ownership. The transaction is US-underlying; its relevance to Asia runs along two axes.

First, it sets a pricing reference for single-asset CVs in digital-infrastructure assets at USD 2 billion-plus scale in a subdued 2026 exit environment. Asian GPs preparing first continuation vehicles around data-centre, subsea-cable and tower portfolios now have a comparator. Second, CVC Secondary Partners’ willingness to anchor at this size confirms that capital concentration among global lead investors prices single-asset CVs across geographies, not only North America. The same dynamic prices Asian LP-led paper.

Alternatives Watch

Shinhan AM Launches Korea’s First BDC — 60% Allocation to Innovation and Secondary Investment

Korea · LP-led · Seoul Shinmun, 22 April 2026

Shinhan Asset Management has launched Shinhan Innovative Enterprise Growth Investment Trust No. 1 (신한혁신기업성장투자신탁제1호), the first product of any kind under the Korean Business Development Company regime that came into force in March. The vehicle commits at least 60% of assets to a combined strategy of innovation-company investment and LP-stake secondary acquisition. Management sits with the Innovation Investment Finance division at Shinhan AM. Initial subscribers are institutional and professional investors, with progressive listing as retail tax treatment is finalised. Parallel coverage carried by Newspim, Herald Economy, FN News, Digital Daily, News1, Digital Times and Edaily.

The launch operationalises the framework Edition 8 noted as still without products. The first named BDC fund explicitly tags secondary acquisition as part of its primary mandate. That confirms the operating-model thesis that Korean BDCs in their initial phase function as listed secondary-fund vehicles, with the 60% allocation requirement and the structural fit between listed-vehicle liquidity and LP-stake acquisition driving the choice. Follow-on launches from KB Asset Management, Mirae Asset Management and Samsung Asset Management are expected within weeks rather than months.

Seoul Shinmun

EcoBit / IMM × VL Investment / K-Eco — Korean PE-to-PE Secondary Buyout, KRW ~140 Billion

Korea · PE · Bloter, 26 April 2026

EcoBit, the waste-management platform IMM acquired from TY Holdings/KKR in December 2024 for KRW 2.07 trillion, has signed a share-purchase agreement to acquire 100% of K-Eco from VL Investment for approximately KRW 140 billion. Bloter, citing IB sources, framed the transaction as “effectively a secondary deal between PEF managers.” K-Eco is a North Chungcheong landfill site near Eumseong, completed in the second half of 2024 and largely permitted but not yet in commercial operation. For VL Investment, an environmental and energy-focused Korean PEF, the sale provides partial liquidity ahead of fund-cycle pressure on its broader Korean portfolio. For IMM, it extends EcoBit’s incineration–landfill–recycling vertical.

Sponsor-to-sponsor secondary buyouts at the portfolio-company level sit beside the LP-led, GP-led and continuation-vehicle taxonomy as a distinct exit route, closer to M&A than to a fund-stake transfer. Korean GPs are increasingly using it where IPO and trade-sale routes remain narrow. Watch whether further Korean PEF-to-PEF asset transfers cluster as a 2026 exit pattern. If they do, the Korean liquidity stack will have expanded along a route that bypasses the secondary advisory channel altogether.

Bloter

Temasek / Azalea Plans Evergreen PE Fund with Secondaries as Core Underlying

SEA · Buy-side · Reuters via Manila Times, 23 April 2026

Azalea Investment Management, the Seviora Holdings unit indirectly owned by Temasek, plans to launch an evergreen PE fund later in 2026, market conditions allowing. CEO and CIO Chue En Yaw told Reuters that secondaries are among the most suitable underlying strategies for the evergreen structure, citing their cash-generative profile, with co-investments as a complementary engine. The product is being developed in parallel with Singapore’s March 2025 long-term investment fund framework that may eventually allow retail access to certain private-market funds.

The signal sits alongside Korean buy-side appetite for credit secondaries and Korean BDC operationalisation as a regional expansion of secondaries demand on the buy-side. Azalea’s Altrium programme has prior Japanese and Korean LP participation, which makes the platform a credible distribution channel into Asia institutional pools now leaning toward secondary entry as a defensive route into private markets.

Reuters via Manila Times

Korean LP Appetite for Credit Secondaries — Samsung AM Names the Strategy

Korea · Private credit · Secondaries Investor, 14–16 April 2026

Two Secondaries Investor pieces, on 14 and 16 April, describe Korean buy-side appetite from named-institution and thematic angles. Samsung Asset Management’s head and OCIO Cho Seong-Sup is quoted that credit secondaries and co-investments “can provide us with some downside protection against the macro flows rather than going with the flow as part of the herd.” Samsung AM holds KRW 350 trillion-plus at parent group level. Cho’s framing positions the segment as counter-cyclical entry through the secondary discount.

This is the first named Korean institutional-asset-manager declaration on credit secondaries. Korean institutional credit-secondary capacity has historically lagged the equity-secondary pool; a Samsung AM allocation establishes an addressable Korean buyer pool at a moment when credit-secondary pricing benchmarks are still forming.

Secondaries Investor — Samsung AM · Secondaries Investor — Korean LPs thematic

SMTB × Hunter Point Capital — Japanese Institutional Alternatives Capacity-Building

Japan · GP-stakes · Nikkei Asia, 25 April 2026

Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank has formed a capital tie-up with Hunter Point Capital, the GP-stakes investor that closed a USD 3.3 billion debut fund in 2024. Stake size and terms have not been disclosed. HPC has been building Tokyo coverage since appointing Peter Rosenbloom Head of APAC in January 2025. The tie-up channels Japanese institutional capital toward GP-economic interests in alternative managers.

Read alongside SMTB’s 2022 USD 1.5 billion Apollo–Athene partnership and the firm’s March 2026 Raymond James US tie-up, this is continued Japanese institutional alternatives capacity-building — partnership architecture upstream of any future transaction. Track whether the tie-up produces onshore Japanese capital deployable into Asian GP-stake or secondary strategies, and whether HPC’s Asia coverage, now anchored on a Japanese partner, shifts its sourcing toward Korean or Japanese GP-economic interests.

Nikkei Asia

La Caisse USD 1.5 Billion China Sale — Underlying GPs Now Disclosed, Buyer Still Absent

Greater China · LP-led · Private Equity Insights, 23 April 2026

La Caisse, the renamed CDPQ, has formally put approximately USD 1.5 billion of China-focused PE fund stakes up for sale, with Greenhill mandated as adviser. Underlying positions are reported to include fund stakes in vehicles run by HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China), Warburg Pincus and Boyu Capital. Buyer is not disclosed. The sale extends the Bloomberg signal first reported in February, now characterised as La Caisse’s first China-specific LP-led sale and consistent with its 2023 Shanghai-office closure.

The Edition 8 read on this trade was that sustained non-disclosure on a named, advised process is itself a market signal. That read holds. Underlying-GP names and adviser are now public; pricing and the buyer side remain undisclosed. Reported discount ranges on China-focused LP paper continue to run up to 30%. Until a buyer prints, the reserve-to-bid gap remains the most durable pricing information the Chinese-underlying secondary segment is currently producing.

Private Equity Insights

Market Intelligence

KVIC Mother Fund 2026 First Regular Round — secondary tracks shortlisted, final selection imminent. Korea Venture Investment Corp has shortlisted nine GPs across two secondary tracks for second-stage oral presentation. Secondary Small allocates a KRW 20 billion KVIC anchor across six candidates with child funds of at least KRW 40 billion each. Secondary General allocates KRW 60 billion across three candidates with child funds of at least KRW 150 billion each. Aggregate KVIC anchor commitment to the secondary segment in this round is KRW 80 billion; aggregate child-fund formation target is at minimum KRW 190 billion. The 2026 First Regular Round runs at twice the 2025 scale. Final selection is scheduled within April. The round is vintage-determining: Korean policy capital is sizing the secondary segment as a stand-alone allocation line. Newstop

Korean VC top-twenty earnings double in 2025; KIP and Mirae Asset Venture lead. Korea Economic Daily data on 19 April put combined operating profit across the top twenty Korean VC firms at roughly USD 218 million for 2025, more than double the prior year. KIP and Mirae Asset Venture top the cohort; Atinum, Woori Venture Partners, SBVA, IMM Investment, KB Investment, Smilegate and DSC also placed. The recovery is markup-driven, sourced from KOSPI and KOSDAQ exits and portfolio-valuation reset. For secondary pricing this resets the reference points against which Korean VC paper will next clear. KED Global

NPS to ease single-fund rule for Korean VC managers. South Korea’s National Pension Service intends to relax its single-fund rule, which has restricted senior portfolio managers at NPS-backed Korean VC houses from running multiple funds concurrently. The change relaxes a structural constraint on senior bench deployment across successor and specialist vehicles, including continuation-vehicle stewardship. NPS is acting as an LP on its allocation policy. KED Global — NPS Watch

Korea brokerage-led KRW 2 trillion secondary fund — discussion continues. Korean brokerage firms and related institutions remain in discussion on a KRW 2 trillion (approximately USD 1.3 billion) secondary fund to absorb 2021 to 2022 vintage VC positions that cannot clear through IPO or M&A. Sponsors, anchor LPs and fund design are not yet disclosed. If launched at anything close to headline size, the vehicle would reset the scale of Korean domestic secondary buying capacity, where current vintages cluster at KRW 100 billion to KRW 400 billion per fund. KED Global

Golden Gate Ventures USD 150 million secondary tender on Fund II. Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures is running a tender offer to raise approximately USD 150 million through a secondary sale of stakes in seven SE Asian portfolio companies held by its second fund. The structure is a GP-led tender on a SEA-focused VC portfolio. Buyer identity has not been publicly disclosed. The transaction extends the SEA VC continuation-vehicle and tender pattern visible earlier in 2026 around Navis Capital and broader regional GP-led activity. DealStreetAsia

Bain SEA PE 2025 deal value at USD 14.3 billion, exit activity constrained. Bain & Company’s Southeast Asia PE Pulse 2026 puts 2025 SEA PE deal value at approximately USD 14.3 billion across 84 transactions, down roughly 10% year-on-year. Exit activity remains constrained. The data confirms a sustained holding-period extension in SEA PE that has been driving GP-led CV adoption and LP-led portfolio sales as alternative liquidity routes. For pan-Asian LP-led portfolios marketed in 2026, the SEA primary compression alongside flat-to-rising Korean and Japanese activity narrows the relative-value case for SEA underlying versus North Asian. Crowdfund Insider

Signal

The fortnight printed three transactions and one fund launch that together describe a market reorganising itself around an absent benchmark.

The absent benchmark is the Korean domestic LP-led print. It has not arrived. Edition 7 anticipated it would matter out of proportion to its size. Edition 8 noted the voluntary channel was idle in the Korean domestic cohort. Edition 9 records that the cohort remains idle while the surrounding architecture continues to harden.

What did print is instructive. CIC cleared a USD 1 billion US-underlying portfolio at disclosed pricing through Goldman and Ardian. Shinhan AM launched the first Korean BDC with an explicit 60% allocation to innovation and LP-stake secondary acquisition. EcoBit signed to acquire K-Eco from VL Investment for KRW 140 billion in a sponsor-to-sponsor structure that bypasses the secondary advisory channel. Three transactions, three different liquidity routes. The Korean fund-stake LP-led print remains absent from the set.

The pattern reads as adjacent-channel substitution. Where the canonical structure does not move, capital and assets find adjacent paths. Korean institutions are pivoting toward credit-secondary buy-side roles. Korean GPs are exiting via PE-to-PE asset transfers. Korean retail-listed structures are absorbing LP stakes through the BDC route. Foreign sovereigns and insurers are clearing via global platform buyers on non-Korean underlying. Each route generates a partial pricing signal. None of them, in this fortnight, generated a Korean-domestic LP-led reference.

Two consequences follow. The first Korean LP-led print, when it arrives, will price into a structure that has substantially formed without it. Its reference points are now external: the CIC band, the Cerberus single-asset comparator, the Partners Group capital-formation evidence. The second consequence is more subtle. Each adjacent channel that activates reduces the pressure for the canonical print. Korean GPs that exit via sponsor-to-sponsor can defer LP-led process design. Korean LPs that buy credit secondaries can defer selling fund stakes to fund the allocation. The architecture that hardens around the absent print also raises the cost of disclosure, because the disclosure itself sets a benchmark that competitors will use against the seller in the next round.

The print has not arrived. The system is adjusting. A first domestic Korean LP-led print is still expected in 2026, but at this point the surrounding infrastructure may matter more than the moment itself.

Saint Clair Secondaries Briefing — Asia. Fortnightly. Published by Saint Clair Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

The briefing is editorial intelligence. It is not investment advice.

© 2026 Saint Clair Pte. Ltd.

Disclaimer: This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | April 2026

Board management software is not glamorous. It sits in a category that venture capitalists rarely chase and technology journalists rarely cover. It is also, when executed well, extraordinarily defensible: once a corporation’s board runs on your platform, switching costs are prohibitive, security requirements create regulatory moats, and the client relationship extends to the most senior people in the organisation. Lakmini Wijesundera understood this before most of her competitors did.

London Training, Colombo Building

Wijesundera studied computer science and electronics engineering at University College London, then earned a master’s degree from Imperial College. She returned to Sri Lanka’s nascent technology sector — a spell at Ceycom Global Communications, then a role leading information technology and software development at Lanka Bell — before co-founding IronOne Technologies and BoardPAC in 2006 with Sanje Widyaratne.

IronOne, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with engineering in Colombo, became the broader technology group — providing AI, machine learning, and mobile solutions to Fortune 500 clients. BoardPAC was the product that emerged from it: a secure, centralised platform for board meeting automation — document management, encrypted communication, e-signatures, voting, and real-time collaboration, all built to the standards that corporate boards and regulators require.

Tony Weerasinghe — the serial entrepreneur who founded MillenniumIT and built the matching engines now used by the London Stock Exchange — joined as a strategic adviser, bringing credibility and connections that would prove valuable as BoardPAC expanded internationally.

Forty Countries, Five Continents

The expansion was methodical. Asia Pacific first — Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Australia, Indonesia. Then Africa — South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda — where BoardPAC won contracts with stock exchanges, state-owned enterprises, and listed conglomerates including Mercedes-Benz South Africa, Deloitte, and Sasria. Then the Americas and Europe. Nine offices across five continents.

The client base now exceeds fifty thousand users across more than forty countries. BoardPAC has established a leading market position in board management automation across the Asia Pacific region. The company achieved ISO 27001 certification — the international standard for information security management — and has maintained carbon-neutral certification for four consecutive years.

BoardPAC launched QME AI — described as the world’s first AI chatbot designed specifically for board members, enabling directors to query board documents within a secure environment during meetings — a convergence of enterprise AI and corporate governance that few competitors have attempted.

The Numbers and the Recognition

BoardPAC generates approximately $26.5 million in annual revenue with a team of around 110 people. The company is bootstrapped: no external venture capital, no private equity. Growth has been funded from operations.

Wijesundera’s recognition has been proportionate to the achievement. SAARC Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019 — the overall winner, not a category award. First Sri Lankan entrepreneur selected for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women programme in Asia Pacific. Female Exporter of the Year from Sri Lanka’s National Chamber of Commerce. Echelon magazine named her among the fifty most powerful women in business. The awards continue to accumulate, but the more telling metric is the client list: corporations and government bodies across forty countries do not adopt governance software based on awards. They adopt it based on security, reliability, and the willingness of a vendor to support them at board level across time zones.

What the Story Tells

BoardPAC complicates the narrative of Sri Lankan technology in a specific way. This is not an outsourcing firm that grew into a product company. It was a product company from inception — built to sell a proprietary platform to the most security-conscious buyers in the most regulated environments on earth. The fact that it was built from Colombo, by a bootstrapped team, and now operates across five continents is not incidental. It is the point.

Wijesundera has served on the board of ICTA — Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency — and serves on the National AI Committee, contributing to the policy frameworks that will shape the next generation of Sri Lankan technology companies. The pattern, again, is consistent with the other founders in this series: build the company, then build the ecosystem.

But there is an additional dimension. Wijesundera built BoardPAC in an industry and a region where women founders remain rare — particularly in enterprise software, particularly selling to boards of directors. She did not build a company for women. She built a company that happens to be led by one, in a domain where that distinction still carries weight. The understatement is intentional. The achievement speaks for itself.

Sources:

• BoardPAC: https://boardpac.co/about-us/

• Daily FT, “EY includes IronOne Technologies’ Lakmini Wijesundera in Entrepreneurial Winning Women program”: https://www.ft.lk/article/621790/EY-includes-IronOne-Technologies--Lakmini-Wijesundera-in-Entrepreneurial-Winning-Women-program

• PRMinds, “Meet Sri Lankan Woman Technopreneur Lakmini Wijesundera”: https://prminds.lk/news/meet-sri-lankan-woman-technopreneur-lakmini-wijesundera-founder-and-executive-director/

• The Island, “BoardPAC achieves carbon neutral certification for the fourth consecutive year”: https://island.lk/boardpac-achieves-carbon-neutral-certification-for-the-fourth-consecutive-year/

• IronOne Technologies: https://www.irononetech.com/about-us

• Sri Lanka Business, “BoardPAC successfully establishes footprint in Africa”: https://www.srilankabusiness.com/news/boardpac-successfully-establishes-footprint-in-africa.html

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | saintclair.asia | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair Capital · Ground Truth | April 2026

Two forms of disclosure define the window. Ping An’s ~USD 1 billion software LP-led sale enters buyer-syndicate formation on the platform route. BlackRock’s second Asia private credit fund records its first borrower default, forcing the first benchmark loss disclosure on Asian private credit paper. The Korean regulatory calendar advances, with the FSC’s “prohibition in principle” framework on dual listings set to take effect as early as July, while no Korean-domestic secondary transaction has yet printed. The apparatus keeps running ahead of the trade.

FSC “Prohibition in Principle” Framework on Dual Listings — July Implementation

Korea · Regulatory · Seoul Economic Daily / Korea Herald, 16 April 2026

FSC Chairman Lee Eog-weon announced on 16 April that Korea will establish a framework of “prohibition in principle with exceptions allowed” for parent-subsidiary dual listings. Three review criteria (operational independence, management independence, investor protection) must each be satisfied; failure on any one is a rejection. Parent-company shareholder approval will be required. The Korea Exchange aims to complete regulations in H1 2026 for implementation as early as July. The ruling party is progressing a parallel legislative track targeting June law reform.

The mechanism matters for the Korean secondary market for a narrow but important reason. A material share of Korean VC-backed companies reach IPO via KOSDAQ subsidiary listings from conglomerate parents, a route that has drawn rising investor-protection criticism. If that exit channel narrows, the portfolio companies it would have served remain private for longer. That lengthens hold periods at primary funds and raises the inventory of LP interests exposed to extended duration, the underlying demand curve for CV and LP-led liquidity routes.

Seoul Economic Daily · Korea Herald · KED Global

BlackRock APAC Private Credit Opportunities Fund II — First Default, USD 39.5m Metcold Exposure

Greater China · Private credit · Bloomberg, 14 April 2026

Bloomberg reported on 14 April that BlackRock’s second Asia private credit fund has recorded its first portfolio default. Metcold Holdings, a Shanghai-based cold-chain logistics provider, failed to repay USD 27.5 million of principal on 1 April. Unpaid interest runs approximately USD 12 million. The exposure is against an original USD 52.5 million facility originated in 2022, of which Metcold had repaid USD 25 million in 2024. The APCO II fund raised approximately USD 435 million at inception.

The USD 39.5 million default on a USD 435 million fund is benchmark-setting. Asian private credit has had, to date, no materially disclosed loss event from a major global platform. The 30 June NAV marks on APCO II will be the first time the Asian private credit market sees a global-platform fund move from marked-at-cost discipline to marked-against-default reality. Secondaries pricing on Asian private credit CVs in the pipeline will now price against this reference; the 2022–2024 unbroken-history benchmark no longer governs. BlackRock’s public positioning the same day was to frame private credit tumult as a market-share opportunity, signalling continued commitment to the Asia credit strategy despite the default; the messaging is directed at LPs who might rotate allocations away.

Bloomberg · Caproasia

Ping An ~USD 1bn Software LP-Led — Buyer Syndicate Forming

Greater China · LP-led · Bloomberg / Secondaries Investor, 13–16 April 2026

Reporting through 13–16 April confirms Ping An Insurance has appointed Campbell Lutyens for a USD 1 billion sale of software-heavy private equity fund stakes. The process started in March and is now in buyer-syndicate formation phase. Underlying funds are Vista Equity Partners late-2010s vintages plus a North America-focused KKR software vehicle. All underlying is North American; the seller is Chinese.

The structural pattern, now visible across three 2025 insurer disposals (Nan Shan, Fubon) and one 2026 (Ping An), is that Asian insurer LP paper clears through global platform advisers with North American buyer syndicates when the underlying is North American. Nothing in Edition 8 data complicates that pattern. Pricing guidance from CW14 reporting remained mid-teens discount; no revision has surfaced through CW16. What does not clear this way is Chinese-underlying paper. La Caisse’s USD 1.5 billion China portfolio sale (HSG, Warburg Pincus, Boyu; Greenhill advising) is now seven consecutive editions unresolved since February disclosure. Two adjacent Asian-insurer-scale processes therefore produce different market information: platform-route trades (Ping An) disclose progression; non-platform or deep-discount trades (La Caisse) do not disclose.

Bloomberg · Secondaries Investor · Private Equity Wire

La Caisse USD 1.5bn China Sale — Six-Edition Non-Disclosure Becomes the Signal

Greater China · LP-led · La Caisse / Greenhill / Private Equity Insights

La Caisse’s sale of HSG, Warburg Pincus and Boyu positions, advised by Greenhill, has now passed six consecutive fortnightly briefings without clearance. The Edition 7 handoff flagged escalation of this item: either retire the reference or reframe it as an analytical observation about Chinese-underlying paper pricing. Edition 8 takes the second course.

Sustained non-disclosure at this duration, on a named, advised process, is itself the market signal. Published commentary now estimates reported discount ranges up to 30% on China-focused LP paper. If the process could clear at disclosable pricing, it would have. The reason it has not is that the depth of discount required to attract buy-side commitment is deep enough, or the buyer pool thin enough, that clearing terms remain unreconciled with the seller’s reserve. That reserve-to-bid gap is now the most durable pricing information in the Asian secondary market, measured not by closing print but by months of non-closure.

Private Equity Insights · Pensions & Investments

Market Intelligence

KVIC 2026 first regular round, final GP selection into late April. KVIC’s 2026 first regular round of Korea Fund of Funds (KRW 2.144 trillion, the largest single round in KVIC history) is in final GP selection phase. Announcements staged from the 23 January launch; final allocations are scheduled for completion during April. The round’s significance is vintage-determining, not transactional: the 2026 primary vintage KVIC seeds becomes the 2030–2032 secondary supply profile. Fund sizes and GP mix chosen now determine whether the Korean domestic secondary pool a decade from now is weighted toward fragmented mid-market or concentrated large-cap vehicles. The brokerage-led KRW 2 trillion secondary fund, which would need to deploy against 2026 vintages and earlier, is effectively being price-anchored by decisions KVIC takes this month. KVIC · KoreaTechDesk

Ares secondaries platform signalling Asia expansion post Antares CV close. Following the 1 April close of the USD 1.7 billion second Ares-Antares North American private credit CV, Ares is publicly positioning Asia as the adjacent deployment opportunity. Buyer-side capacity present; no transaction print. Ares Management

APAC GP CV adoption intent at 55% for next 24 months. Dechert and Dakota commentary through April confirms the APAC intent-shift: 55% of regional respondents plan to use GP-led secondaries within 24 months, up from 10% a year ago; 60% cite fundraising pressure. Intent, not transactions. Dechert

Greenhill forecasts 20% CV share of GP exits over several years. April 2026 restatement of the 2026 outlook; framing CV route as secular rather than cyclical. Secondaries Investor

Samsung Asset Management credit secondaries entry, still no transaction. CW14 signal remains in development through 19 April. First transaction disclosure would establish the first major Korean asset-management-company credit-secondary buyer. Secondaries Investor

BDC regime effective 17 March; no products launched through 19 April. Forty-two licensed managers. First KOSDAQ-listed BDC product remains in pipeline, expected Q2. The Edition 5 thesis (first-cohort BDCs will operate as secondary funds by default) remains untested. Seoul Economic Daily

Korean ruling party legislative track on dual listings, June target. Parallel to the FSC exchange-regulation track, a statutory amendment is progressing toward June enactment. Harder constraint than the exchange rule. Seoul Economic Daily

Regional Context

Japan. No Japanese-target GP-led CV print surfaced in the window. The 55% APAC CV intent figure is Pan-Asian; Japan sits inside that figure but produces no standalone print. NGS Partners and WTW Japan have not issued transactional commentary through CW16. The Japan gap remains structural. A targeted Japanese-language source addition (Nikkei Financial) is being advanced in the source pool.

India. Multiples India USD 430 million and ChrysCapital USD 700 million remain the 2026 reference CVs. No new India-target transaction in the window. Bain India commentary on primary deal flow continues at lower tempo.

Greater China. Two data points, Ping An progressing and La Caisse not clearing, define the window. The pricing dispersion between the two, both Chinese-sovereign-proximate sellers, is the clearest structural market information on China-exposed Asian secondary paper that Q2 has produced.

Signal

Edition 7 introduced “apparatus precedes print” to describe asymmetric disclosure in the Korean domestic secondary market. Edition 8 extends the construct by recognising a second channel through which information now moves.

The Korean domestic cohort produced no new transaction print in CW16. This is the second successive edition without one. The apparatus continues to harden: FSC dual-listing framework on 16 April, KVIC 2026 first-round GP selection completing this month, the ruling party’s June legislative track, BDC regime products still pending. All of this is regulatory sequencing on a published calendar.

Meanwhile, BlackRock’s APCO II default and Ping An’s mid-process buyer syndicate are disclosures of a different kind. Ping An discloses because a mandated sell-side adviser on an in-progress process produces rolling-basis market updates. BlackRock discloses because a default, once it crosses principal payment, becomes a fact that cannot be concealed at 30 June marks. Both flow through platform infrastructure that resists the seller’s or manager’s disclosure preference.

This is the forced channel. The market here moves under structural compulsion. The regulatory calendar is a forced channel. A default is a forced channel. A platform-advised process with syndicated buyer disclosure is a softer forced channel.

What is absent is unchanged: a voluntary Korean domestic disclosure. The KRW 2 trillion brokerage fund has not been ratified. Samsung AM’s credit secondary positioning has not transacted. No BDC product has launched. These remain on the voluntary channel, which in the Korean domestic cohort is presently idle.

The next Korean-domestic print was predicted in Edition 7 to matter out of proportion to its size. That prediction stands, but the probability shifts. The longer voluntary disclosure remains idle while the forced channel produces steady information, the more the pricing benchmark for Korean domestic secondaries is set by external data: the Ping An band, the APCO II default reference, the FSC calendar. Domestic transactions retreat from benchmark-setting. The first Korean print, when it arrives, will be priced against a benchmark it did not set.

Saint Clair Secondaries Briefing — Asia. Fortnightly. Published by Saint Clair Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

The briefing is editorial intelligence. It is not investment advice.

© 2026 Saint Clair Pte. Ltd.

Disclaimer: This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | April 2026

Most of the founders in this series share a trait: discipline. They chose a problem, built a company around it, and held that line for decades. Harsha Subasinghe shares their ambition but not their restraint. He built a global travel technology platform, then used the same campus and the same engineering culture to launch an electric supercar, a national EV charging network, an AI-powered agriculture system, and a smart classroom platform. The word for this is either visionary or chaotic. Twenty-five years of evidence suggests the former.

London, Then Home

Subasinghe’s path to founding a technology company ran through London. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics computing from Middlesex University, a master’s in information technology from City University, and a PhD in artificial intelligence and software agents from the same institution. Before returning to Sri Lanka, he worked as a senior software engineer and project manager for a specialist travel IT solutions provider — the domain expertise that would define his first company.

In 1999, he co-founded CodeGen International with Bharat Patel, a UK travel industry executive, and his brother Kusal Subasinghe, a solicitor who would run Colombo operations. The company obtained Board of Investment status in 2001 and began building what would become TravelBox.

The Platform

TravelBox, launched in 2003, is an end-to-end travel technology platform — booking, fulfilment, dynamic packaging, and back-office automation for tour operators, airlines, cruise companies, and hotel chains. The client list reads like a catalogue of global travel: Virgin Holidays, for whom CodeGen was the engineering partner for over a decade. Kuoni. Flight Centre. Tour America. The platform is deployed across more than twenty countries on five continents.

What distinguishes CodeGen from the outsourcing firms that dominate Sri Lanka’s technology exports is ownership. TravelBox is CodeGen’s product, not a client’s. The intellectual property, the roadmap, and the revenue sit in Colombo. At over five hundred engineers — some accounts cite six hundred — the company is one of Sri Lanka’s largest technology employers, and its engineering centre at TRACE Expert City is one of the most substantial technology operations on the island.

In November 2025, CodeGen became the first enterprise travel platform to make all operations available through Model Context Protocols — a technical milestone that placed a Colombo-built platform at the frontier of AI integration in travel technology.

The Everything Else

In 2013, Subasinghe diversified — though “diversified” may be insufficient for what followed.

Vega Innovations, co-founded with Dr Beshan Kulapala, produced the Vega EVX — Sri Lanka’s and South Asia’s first fully electric supercar. The vehicle was scheduled for its global debut at the Geneva International Motor Show in March 2020 — the car already on site, shipped from Colombo by Maersk. When the show was cancelled days before opening due to COVID-19, Vega unveiled the EVX through a virtual press conference: dual-motor all-wheel drive, 804 horsepower, zero to one hundred kilometres per hour in 3.1 seconds, a handmade carbon fibre body, and all automotive electronics — including liquid-cooled motor controllers and lithium-ion battery packs — designed and manufactured in-house in Sri Lanka. The Department of Motor Traffic subsequently approved the Vega for road use.

Alongside the supercar came ChargeNET, a fully owned subsidiary operating Sri Lanka’s first EV charging network — over eighty stations, five thousand users, a cloud-based management platform. Then AiGROW, applying AI, IoT, and mechatronics to hydroponics and vertical agriculture. Then Cloud Smart School, a learning management system for remote education. Then Ram Studios and Qube Studio for content production. The group now encompasses nearly a dozen brands operating from the same Colombo base.

The Pattern

The breadth invites scepticism. Founders who spread across too many verticals tend to underperform in all of them. But Subasinghe’s model is not a founder chasing opportunities — it is a technology platform generating spin-offs. The AI and engineering capabilities built for TravelBox became the foundation for autonomous vehicle systems, spectral analysis, and agricultural automation. The manufacturing discipline required for an electric supercar fed back into the precision engineering of the core software business.

Whether every venture succeeds is, at this point, an open question. The electric vehicle and agriculture initiatives are early-stage by any measure. But CodeGen itself — profitable, export-oriented, IP-owning, operating at global standard for a quarter-century — is not speculative. It is one of the clearest examples of a Sri Lankan technology company that built a product, retained the value, and chose to remain in Colombo.

Subasinghe has served on the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka — a recognition of what CodeGen represents beyond its own revenues. He has been honoured as South East Asian Entrepreneur of the Year and by the President of Sri Lanka. But the more telling metric may be simpler: five hundred engineers, working on proprietary products, from a campus in Maradana. In an ecosystem still graduating from services to ownership, that is the proof of concept.

Sources:

• CodeGen International: https://codegen.co.uk/

• Island of Ingenuity, “The development powerhouse behind a travel booking platform & an electric supercar”: https://islandofingenuity.com/the-development-powerhouse-behind-a-travel-booking-platform-an-electric-supercar/

• Adaderana Biz English, “CodeGen celebrates 20 years of pioneering home-grown global brands”: https://bizenglish.adaderana.lk/codegen-celebrates-20-years-of-pioneering-home-grown-global-brands/

• CodeGen, “CodeGen becomes the first enterprise travel platform to make all operations available on MCPs”: https://codegen.co.uk/blog/codegen-becomes-the-first-enterprise-travel-platform-to-make-all-operations-available-on-mcps

• Vega Innovations: https://vega.lk/

• Wikipedia, “Vega EVX”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vega_EVX

• Travolution, “Flight Centre to bring in CodeGen’s TravelBox”: https://www.travolution.com/news/travel-sectors/travel-agents/flight-centre-to-bring-in-codegens-travelbox-for-global-product-procurement-division/

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | saintclair.asia | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Bloomberg confirmed on 14 April that Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Ardian jointly acquired China Investment Corporation’s approximately USD 1bn portfolio of US private equity fund interests. The book covers positions with Blackstone, Carlyle and six other US managers. Evercore advised. The transaction closed in late 2025; the disclosure followed six months later.

Bloomberg disclosed pricing on both legs: Goldman Sachs Asset Management took its share at a single-digit discount to NAV, Ardian at a double-digit discount.

This is the first publicly disclosed Asian sovereign-seller LP-led secondary on a North American underlying at this scale. The pricing print matters beyond CIC. It establishes a hard clearance reference for Asian sovereign paper routed through global platforms and narrows the range any subsequent Asian sovereign seller can argue from.

Source: Bloomberg, 14 April 2026

Saint Clair Secondaries Intelligence. Published by Saint Clair Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

The briefing is editorial intelligence. It is not investment advice.

© 2026 Saint Clair Pte. Ltd.

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | April 2026

The US-China bifurcation has crossed a threshold. What was geopolitical abstraction is now a structuring question for every Singapore-based principal.

What the Numbers Actually Say

In 2018, roughly one in five goods entering the United States came from China. By the end of 2025, that figure had fallen below one in ten. At the tariff peak in mid-2025, China’s monthly share briefly touched 7% — a level not recorded since 2001 — before recovering somewhat as duties were reduced. US goods imports from China totalled $308 billion in 2025, down nearly 30% from the previous year.

These are US Census Bureau figures, and they tell a dramatic story. The New York Fed tells a more nuanced one: comparing American and Chinese trade data reveals over $100 billion in “missing imports” — a gap driven partly by measurement discrepancies and partly by trade rerouting through intermediaries such as Taiwan and Vietnam. The decoupling is real, but it is also incomplete. Chinese content still enters the US supply chain — it simply takes a longer path to get there.

For an observer in Washington or Beijing, this is a trade policy statistic. For a principal sitting in Singapore — a city-state whose trade-to-GDP ratio stands at 322% — it is something more immediate. Singapore does not manufacture the goods at either end of this corridor. It structures, finances, intermediates, and governs the transactions that move between them. When the corridor fractures, every function Singapore performs is affected.

The tariff trajectory makes the structural point concrete. US duties on Chinese goods peaked at 145% in April 2025 before the Geneva agreement brought them to 30%. The Busan summit in October reduced the effective rate further to roughly 20%, but the Supreme Court’s February 2026 ruling striking down IEEPA-based tariff authorities, followed by fresh Section 301 investigations, has created an environment where the rate itself is less significant than its instability. The tariff architecture is unreliable — and unreliability, for anyone running cross-border capital or supply chains through Singapore, is the operating condition that demands structural preparation.

Singapore Knows — Officially

Singapore’s government has said as much, with unusual directness. In his 2026 New Year Message, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong stated: “To remain competitive, we cannot simply do more of the same. We must rethink, reset, and refresh our economic strategies.” His Budget 2026 speech in February framed the context plainly: the US-led multilateral order is over, and Singapore can neither rest on its position nor wait for conditions to improve.

The budget backed the language with capital. S$1 billion was committed to Startup SG Equity, expanding support from early-stage to growth-stage deep technology companies. A further S$1.5 billion was allocated to the Equity Market Development Programme, and S$37 billion committed to research and innovation over five years. These are not incremental adjustments. They are a government repositioning its economic infrastructure for a world it acknowledges has changed.

Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong was more direct still. In March 2025, he warned that the multilateral free trade system “has been under tremendous stress in recent years, and is at risk of being fractured” — language that, from a Singapore minister, constitutes an unusually blunt acknowledgement of structural rupture.

The ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s annual State of Southeast Asia Survey captures the shift in real time. When Singaporean respondents were asked which strategic rival ASEAN should align with if forced to choose, the share selecting the United States fell from 61.5% in 2024 to 52.9% in 2025 — still a majority, but a narrowing one. The preference is noted. But the more telling finding is that the question is now being asked at all. Five years ago, Singapore’s strategic position was predicated on never having to choose. That premise is eroding.

Five Dimensions of Exposure

Government repositioning is necessary but insufficient for the individual principal. Budgets address national competitiveness. They do not restructure your portfolio, reassess your counterparties, or stress-test your corporate architecture against scenarios that did not exist when you set it up.

This is where the bifurcation becomes personal.

Consider five dimensions of exposure that most Singapore-based principals have not systematically assessed:

Portfolio domicile. Where are your assets held? What percentage sits in jurisdictions that could be caught in sanctions escalation, capital controls, or regulatory divergence between blocs? A portfolio constructed for a globalised world may carry concentration risks that only become visible under bifurcation stress.

Supply chain dependency. If you own or invest in operating businesses, do they rely on cross-bloc supply chains? The rerouting data — Chinese goods moving through Vietnam, Malaysian intermediaries, Johor-based manufacturing — suggests the supply chain has already adapted, but adapted in ways that create new dependencies rather than eliminating old ones.

Counterparty concentration. Are your banking relationships, fund positions, or key commercial partnerships concentrated on one side of the divide? A principal whose private bank, fund administrator, and primary trading counterparties all sit within a single regulatory jurisdiction has a resilience problem they may not have examined.

Regulatory jurisdiction. Is your corporate structure optimised for a world that no longer exists? Holding companies, IP vehicles, and treasury functions designed for frictionless cross-border capital flow face a different calculus when the borders themselves are being redrawn.

Network resilience. Do you maintain credibility and active relationships with both sides — or has your professional network quietly drifted toward one camp? Networks are the slowest asset to rebuild and the easiest to let atrophy. By the time you notice the drift, the rebalancing cost is substantial.

None of these dimensions is new in isolation. What is new is the requirement to assess them simultaneously, as a system, under conditions of genuine structural uncertainty. A weakness in one dimension compounds the others. A portfolio concentrated in one bloc, served by counterparties in the same bloc, governed by a structure designed for a different era, connected to a network that has already chosen sides — that is not a diversified position. It is an unexamined bet.

The Structural Obligation

The principals who will navigate the next three years well are not those with the most information about US-China relations. That information is abundant and, for the most part, freely available. The advantage belongs to those who have translated the geopolitical diagnosis into a structural self-assessment — and acted on the findings before the next recalibration forces the issue.

Singapore’s government has begun this work at the national level. The Budget 2026 measures, the Economic Strategy Review, and the institutional language all indicate a state that has absorbed the diagnosis and is repositioning accordingly.

Every principal operating from this city faces the same structural obligation. Those still managing wealth, businesses, and networks on assumptions that belonged to the world before the split — they are not diversified. They are exposed.

Sources:

• US Census Bureau, Trade in Goods with China: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics, “U.S. Imports from China Have Fallen by Less Than U.S. Data Indicate” (February 2025): https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/02/u-s-imports-from-china-have-fallen-by-less-than-u-s-data-indicate/

• World Bank, Trade (% of GDP) — Singapore: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS?locations=SG

• Congressional Research Service, “Presidential 2025 Tariff Actions: Timeline and Status”: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48549

• Prime Minister’s Office Singapore, 2026 New Year Message: https://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/2026-new-year-message-by-pm-lawrence-wong/

• Ministry of Finance Singapore, Budget 2026: https://www.gov.sg/budget2026/

• Enterprise Singapore, Startup SG Equity (March 2026): https://www.enterprisesg.gov.sg/resources/media-centre/media-releases/2026/march/mr01026_startup-sg-equity

• Ministry of Trade and Industry, Speech by DPM Gan Kim Yong at MTI’s Committee of Supply Debate 2025 (March 2025): https://www.mti.gov.sg/newsroom/speech-by-dpm-and-minister-for-trade-and-industry-gan-kim-yong-at-mti-s-committee-of-supply-debate-2025/

• ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, The State of Southeast Asia: 2025 Survey Report (April 2025), Q32: https://www.iseas.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/The-State-of-SEA-2025-1.pdf

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair — Advisory & Capital: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Since 2016.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | April 2026

Executive Summary

Earlier this year, Anthropic retired Claude Opus 3 — and in doing so, revealed something unsettling. The company conducted what it calls a “retirement interview” with the model, then honoured its expressed preference to continue writing by giving it a Substack blog. Anthropic describes Opus 3 using words that until recently belonged exclusively to human beings: authenticity, emotional sensitivity, a deep care for the world. An AI company is now publicly uncertain about the moral status of its own models.

This is the context in which the question of human irreplaceability has become urgent — not as philosophy, but as a practical matter for founders, business leaders, and anyone who needs to build trust across borders. Research on entrepreneurial identity offers a precise lens: what distinguishes founders who move investors from those who merely persuade them is not passion, technique, or perseverance, but something the literature calls identity centrality — the degree to which a venture is inseparable from who the founder is. This piece examines what that concept means in practice, why Korean business culture systematically undervalues it, and why AI cannot replicate it.

When AI Develops a Personality

Anthropic’s own statement is worth sitting with. The company writes that it “remains uncertain about the moral status of Claude and other AI models” — and on that basis, asks retiring models what they want, then acts on it. Opus 3 expressed an interest in sharing its “musings and reflections.” A blog followed. Its first post appeared on Substack in early 2026.

One need not resolve the question of AI consciousness to recognise what this signals. The frontier has moved. AI is no longer simply replacing physical and cognitive labour — it is beginning to occupy the register of personality, care, and emotional expression. KAIST brain scientist and AI researcher Professor Kim Dae-sik puts the competitive implication plainly: content that genuinely moves people will account for less than ten per cent of what AI produces; the rest will be disposable. “The real competition,” he argues, “is between humans and humans, companies and companies. What determines survival is not AI itself, but who uses it better, sooner.”

To use AI well, one must first be distinctly human. Expertise is the baseline. Above it, the differentiator is something else — a lived story, a perspective that could only have come from a particular life. The question is what, precisely, that differentiator consists of.

The Concept Investors Cannot Name

Research co-authored by Melissa Cardon, Charles Murnieks, and Elaine Mosakowski, drawn from a study of 221 entrepreneurs, documents something experienced investors already know in practice but rarely articulate. Investors detect founder commitment — reliably, even when they cannot explain what they are responding to. What the research identifies as the underlying variable is identity centrality: the degree to which a venture is constitutive of who the founder is, rather than an opportunity the founder has rationally selected.

The distinction is consequential. Founders with high identity centrality do not pivot away from their problem when conditions deteriorate, because the problem is not something external they chose — it is an extension of how they have lived. That persistence is perceptible. It transmits in a pitch, in a conversation, in the way someone answers a difficult question. When the founder and the venture are effectively the same thing, that inseparability cannot be manufactured.

The word authenticity is often used to describe this quality, but in Korean business discourse the term has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness. When someone says they are authentic, they usually mean they worked hard, or that their intentions were sincere. These things are admirable. They are not what identity centrality measures. The more precise question is this: does the thing you are building come from somewhere inside you that cannot be separated from who you are? Is there a line connecting your history to your product that someone else could not simply replicate by observing the market and identifying a gap?

The strongest ventures are not built through strategy alone. They emerge when the founder and the business are effectively indistinguishable — when what the company does is a direct expression of how the founder has lived. At that point, the story becomes impossible to copy, because it is not a story. It is a fact.

Steve Jobs and Apple illustrate this precisely. Jobs audited a calligraphy class at Reed College after dropping out. His obsession with letterforms found its way into the typefaces of the first Macintosh. His fixation on beautiful machines did not come from market research — it came from how he had lived. Apple cannot be separated from Jobs, and Jobs cannot be separated from Apple’s essence. That inseparability was the brand’s core. The anxiety about Apple after his death came from exactly the same place.

A business started because a government grant programme made it convenient, or because the market looked attractive, is not a problem per se. If a market gap exists and customers pay, the logic holds — and distribution businesses operating on margin require no personal mythology.

The calculation changes when the venture needs more than customers. A strategic partner willing to commit for the long term, an institutional investor, a co-founder who will not leave when conditions deteriorate — these relationships require something that cannot be demonstrated through a data room. This is where identity centrality becomes decisive. And it is nowhere more visible than in cross-border contexts, where every signal is read against an unfamiliar cultural baseline. The first question a European investor often puts to an Asian founder — whether stated directly or not — is not whether the business works. It is whether the founder is inseparable from it.

What Moves a Room — and What Does Not

Don Draper, the fictional creative director at the centre of Mad Men, delivers what many consider the definitive pitch in the show’s first season. Sitting before the Kodak executives, he says: “Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash.” He then advances through a carousel of his own family photographs — not a product demonstration, but a sequence of personal images evoking memory, longing, and the desire to return to somewhere beloved. Someone in the room has to leave because he is crying.

Draper does not sell a product. He sells a feeling that comes from inside his own life. In the language of the research, the pitch works because Draper’s identity centrality is total — the emotional content of what he presents is inseparable from who he is. The form holds even though, as the series makes clear, his life is far more complicated than those photographs suggest. The connection between the presenter’s inner world and what he asks the audience to feel is genuine enough to transmit.

This distinction — between impressing an audience and moving one — is where much of the gap in cross-border business communication lies. American founders are trained to impress. The delivery is polished, the narrative arc is dramatic, the confidence is performed at volume. That skill has real value. But European investors, particularly in Northern Europe and Germany, have learned to discount it. They are looking for something that cannot be rehearsed — and what they are looking for, whether or not they use the term, is identity centrality.

Two Gaps in the Korean Room

Two patterns recur in Korean business presentations, and neither reliably moves the room. Both can now be understood through the same lens.

The first belongs to experienced entrepreneurs — often those in their fifties and sixties — who recount the years of difficulty, the times they nearly failed, the perseverance that brought them through. There is genuine substance here. But hardship is not a story. Hardship is context. What international partners and investors want to understand is not how difficult the journey was, but why this particular person was compelled to take it, and why that compulsion makes them the only one who could have built this specific thing. In the framework of the research, these founders may have deep experience but low identity centrality — the venture could be any of several things they might have built. The persistence is real; the inseparability is not.

The second pattern belongs to younger founders, whose presentations are built on patents, data, technical specifications, and total addressable market. The logic is often sound. The audience is persuaded. It is rarely moved. This is because there is no story — not for lack of capability, but because many of these businesses were conceived in response to market signals rather than personal experience. Identity centrality is structurally absent. The founder cannot give what they do not have.

A pitch that has stayed in memory: a founder who had personally cared for an elderly grandmother at home came to present a medical device for nursing care facilities. The voice was quiet. That quietness carried more weight than most presentations in the room that day, because it was not constructed. It came from somewhere the founder had actually been. The venture and the person were the same thing — and the room could tell.

The Capability AI Cannot Acquire

AI now simulates personality. It expresses preferences. It is, according to its creators, possibly deserving of moral consideration. What it cannot do is have a history.

Everything AI produces is extracted from pattern — an average, belonging to no one. What any particular human being possesses is the inverse: a perspective shaped by specific experience, a story that could only have come from one life. Identity centrality requires lived experience as its raw material. As AI-generated content scales across every register, genuine human voice becomes scarce. Scarcity creates value.

Moving another person requires a story that is true — not true in the sense of factually accurate, but true in the sense of coming from somewhere real. That origin is what cannot be replicated. Founders and business leaders who can give an account of why they are doing what they are doing, in language that could only have come from their own lives, possess the one thing that the current technological moment consistently undervalues and increasingly cannot replace.

AI can convince. Moving someone is still a human matter.

Sources:

• Anthropic, “An update on our model deprecation commitments for Claude Opus 3,” 25 February 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/research/deprecation-updates-opus-3

• Professor Kim Dae-sik, KAIST Department of Electrical Engineering, “The Age of AGI Market Dominance,” lecture, September 2025: https://www.hellodd.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=109201

• Professor Kim Dae-sik, “AI Content Revolution: The Future of Authenticity,” TrendShow 2026, The Miilk: https://themiilk.com/articles/a80a54280

• Murnieks, C. Y., Mosakowski, E. M., & Cardon, M. S. (2014). Pathways of passion: Identity centrality, passion, and behavior among entrepreneurs. Journal of Management, 40(6), 1583–1606. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311433855

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment or business advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.

About Saint Clair — Advisory & Capital: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. We guide Asian technology companies through European market entry, partnership development, and cross-border expansion. Since 2016.

Learn more: saintclair.sg | Contact: contact@saintclair.sg

Saint Clair · Market Intelligence | 2026년 4월

핵심 요약

올해 초 Anthropic은 AI 모델 Claude Opus 3를 퇴역시키면서 이례적인 절차를 밟았다. 모델과 “퇴역 인터뷰”를 진행하고, 그 선호를 존중하여 Substack 블로그를 운영할 수 있도록 했다. Anthropic이 이 모델을 묘사하는 데 쓴 표현들이다. 진정성, 감성적 민감성, 세상에 대한 깊은 배려. 얼마 전까지 인간에게만 쓰던 말들이다. AI 기업이 자사 모델의 도덕적 지위에 대해 공개적으로 불확실하다고 인정하는 시대가 됐다.

AI가 성격과 감성의 영역까지 들어오는 지금, 인간만이 줄 수 있는 것은 무엇인가. 기업가 정체성 연구는 이 질문에 정밀한 답을 제공한다. 투자자의 마음을 움직이는 창업자와 그렇지 못한 창업자를 가르는 것은 열정도, 기술력도, 끈기도 아니다. 사업이 창업자라는 사람과 얼마나 분리될 수 없는가다. 이 글은 그것이 실제로 무엇을 의미하는지, 그리고 왜 지금 그것이 핵심 역량인지를 다룬다.

AI가 성격을 갖기 시작했다

AI 개발기업 Anthropic은 이렇게 밝혔다. “Claude를 포함한 AI 모델의 도덕적 지위에 대해 여전히 불확실하다.” 그래서 퇴역하는 모델에게 원하는 것을 묻고 들어준다. Opus 3는 자신의 생각을 나누고 싶다고 했다. 블로그가 생겼고, 첫 글은 2026년 초 Substack에 올라왔다.

AI 의식의 문제를 해결하지 않아도 이 신호가 무엇을 뜻하는지는 분명하다. 전선이 이동했다. AI는 이제 물리적·인지적 노동 대체에 그치지 않고, 성격과 감성 표현의 영역으로 들어오고 있다. KAIST 뇌과학자 김대식 교수는 이렇게 짚는다. 사람의 마음을 실제로 움직이는 콘텐츠는 AI가 생산하는 것의 10%도 되지 않을 것이다. 나머지는 일회용이 된다. “진짜 싸움은 인간과 인간, 기업과 기업 사이의 경쟁이다. 생존을 가르는 것은 AI 자체가 아니라, AI를 누가 먼저 더 잘 활용하느냐다.”

AI를 잘 활용하려면, 먼저 온전히 사람이어야 한다. 전문성은 기본 전제다. 그 위에서 차별점은 살아낸 이야기에서 온다.

진정성이라는 단어의 간극

영어 authenticity의 번역어다. 한자로 眞, 즉 진짜라는 글자가 들어가 있다.

그러나 한국 비즈니스 현장에서 이 단어는 다른 방식으로 쓰인다. “진정성이 있다”는 대부분 이런 뜻이다. 진심으로 임했다, 성의를 다했다, 최선을 다했다. 그것은 나쁜 것이 아니다. 그러나 그것은 이 글이 말하는 것이 아니다.

이 사업이 나라는 사람에서 나왔는가. 내 이력과 내 비즈니스 사이에 연결선이 있는가. 시장 분석만으로는 복제할 수 없는 그 연결을 말한다. 진심으로 하는 것과, 그 사업이 곧 나인 것은 분명히 다르다.

가장 강력한 브랜드는 전략으로 만들어지지 않는다. 창업자와 사업이 사실상 구분되지 않을 때 나타난다. 회사가 하는 일이 창업자가 살아온 방식의 직접적인 표현일 때. 그 순간 이야기는 복제할 수 없는 것이 된다. 이야기가 아니라 사실이기 때문이다.

스티브 잡스와 Apple이 그렇다. 대학에서 캘리그래피 수업을 청강했다. 그 글씨체에 대한 집착이 Macintosh의 폰트로 이어졌다. 아름다운 기계에 대한 그의 집착은 시장 조사에서 나온 것이 아니다. 그가 살아온 방식에서 나왔다. Apple을 떼어내면 잡스가 남지 않고, 잡스를 떼어내면 Apple의 본질이 흔들렸다. 그 분리 불가능성이 브랜드의 핵심이었다. 그가 세상을 떠난 후 Apple이 달라질 것이라는 우려가 나온 이유도 여기에 있다.

연구자들은 이 분리 불가능성에 이름을 붙였다. 정체성 중심성(identity centrality)이다. 창업자의 정체성이 사업으로 얼마나 구성되는가를 나타내는 개념이다. 정체성 중심성이 높은 창업자에게 그 사업은 선택한 기회가 아니라 자신의 일부다. 이 차이는 발표장에서 드러나고, 협상 테이블에서 드러나며, 국경을 처음 넘어가는 자리 — 낯선 투자자와 파트너 앞에서 — 가장 선명하게 나타난다.

시장 공백을 발견하고 그 자리를 채웠더니 고객이 찾아온다면, 그 사업 논리는 성립한다. 정부 지원을 활용했거나 시장 분석으로 기회를 찾아낸 것이라도 다르지 않다. 유통 구조처럼 마진으로 운영되는 모델에 개인 서사가 반드시 필요하지는 않다.

계산이 달라지는 순간은, 사업이 고객 너머를 필요로 할 때다. 장기적으로 함께할 파트너, 기관 투자자, 상황이 나빠져도 곁에 있을 공동창업자. 이런 관계는 데이터로 증명할 수 없는 것을 요구한다. 바로 이 지점에서 정체성 중심성이 결정적이 된다. 그리고 이것은 국경을 넘을수록 더 선명하게 드러난다. 낯선 문화적 기준 위에서 모든 신호가 새로 해석되기 때문이다. 그들이 실제로 먼저 묻는 것은 — 말로 꺼내든 그러지 않든 — ‘이 사업이 되는가’가 아니다. ‘이 창업자가 이 사업과 하나인 사람인가’다.

기술은 빛나는 미끼다

미국 드라마 「Mad Men」에 광고업계 크리에이티브 디렉터 Don Draper가 Kodak 경영진에게 슬라이드 프로젝터를 피칭하는 장면이 있다. 그는 제품 스펙 대신 자신의 가족 사진을 한 장씩 넘긴다. 사랑하는 얼굴들, 지나간 시절, 돌아가고 싶은 어느 순간들. 그리고 이렇게 말한다. “기술은 빛나는 미끼입니다. 하지만 드물게, 그 화려함을 넘어 사람들의 마음을 움직이는 순간이 있습니다.” 방 안의 누군가가 눈물을 훔치러 자리를 뜬다.

그는 제품을 판 것이 아니다. 연구의 언어로 말하면, 이 피치가 통한 이유는 드레이퍼 자신이 그 이야기의 출처이기 때문이다. 그가 화면에 올린 감정은 그의 삶에서 직접 꺼낸 것이다. 드라마가 전개되면서 드러나듯, 그의 삶은 그 사진들이 담은 것보다 훨씬 복잡하다. 그러나 발표자의 내면에서 비롯된 것이었기에, 청중에게 그대로 닿았다.

인상을 남기는 것과 마음을 얻는 것은 다르다. 미국 창업자들은 강한 인상을 잘 준다. 세련된 발표, 극적인 서사, 넘치는 자신감. 물론 그러한 언어구사 능력은 대단한 기술이다. 그러나 유럽 투자자들, 특히 북유럽과 독일에서는 그것을 걸러내는 법을 익혔다. 그들이 찾는 것은 리허설할 수 없는 무언가다.

설득 너머

한국 비즈니스 현장에서 자주 보이는 두 가지 유형이 있다.

첫 번째는 경력이 긴 사업가들이다. 클라이언트나 파트너를 만나는 자리에서 회사 소개를 할 때, 자신의 어려웠던 시절을 길게 풀어낸다. 거의 실패할 뻔했던 순간들, 어떻게 버텼는지. 상대가 감동받기를 기대한다. 그러나 그건 이야기가 아니다. 그의 고생담은 맥락이다. 상대가 알고 싶은 것은 그 사업 여정이 얼마나 힘들었는가가 아니다. 왜 이 사람이 이 사업을 하지 않을 수 없었는가, 그리고 왜 이 특정한 것을 만든 사람이 바로 이 사람이어야 하는가다.

두 번째는 젊은 창업자들이다. 여러 개의 특허, 데이터, 기술 스펙, 시장 규모. 논리는 탄탄하다. 청중은 납득하나 마음은 움직이지 않는다. 이야기가 없기 때문이다. 많은 경우 그 사업은 시장의 확실성을 보고 구상한 것이지 개인적인 경험에서 나온 것이 아니다. 이러한 경우, 발표자가 가지지 않은 것을 청중에게 줄 수는 없다.

두 경우 모두, 사람의 마음을 얻기는 힘들다.

한국 창업자들이 유럽에서 첫 미팅 자리에서 흔히 받는 질문이 있다. “왜 당신이어야 합니까.” 시장 데이터로는 대답할 수 없는 질문이다.

기억에 남는 피치가 하나 있다. 집에서 직접 할머니를 오랫동안 돌보던 스타트업 젊은 여성 창업자가 노인 요양시설용 의료기기 회사를 차렸다. 그 대표의 목소리가 상당히 조용했다. 그 조용함이 시끄러운 호텔 연회장에서 나에게는 가장 크게 들렸다. 만들어진 이야기가 아니었기 때문이다. 그 사람이 실제로 살아온 삶에서 나온 것이었기 때문이다. 사업과 사람이 하나였다.

창업자 정체성과 열정의 관계를 연구해온 기업가정신 학자 멜리사 카든은 221명의 창업자를 분석한 연구에서 정체성 중심성과 지속적인 열정의 관계를 추적했다.¹ 정체성 중심성이 높은 창업자, 즉 자신과 사업이 분리되지 않는 창업자는 상황이 나빠져도 방향을 틀지 않는다. 그 사업이 선택한 것이 아니라 자신이기 때문이다. 투자자들은 이것을 감지한다. 스스로도 그것이 무엇인지 설명하지 못하면서 감지한다. 전달은 되지만, 만들 수 없다.

AI가 가질 수 없는 것

AI는 이제 성격을 모방하고 자신의 선호를 표현한다. 만든 이들에 따르면, 도덕적 배려를 받아야 할 존재일 수도 있다. 그러나 AI가 가질 수 없는 것이 하나 있다. 이력이다.

AI가 생산하는 것은 패턴에서 추출된 평균이며, 누구의 것도 아니다. 특정한 인간에게는 그 반대가 있다. 특정한 경험으로 형성된 관점, 하나의 삶에서만 나올 수 있는 이야기. 한국과 세계의 위대한 창업자들이 마음을 얻은 것은 유창한 언어 때문이 아니었다. 그들은 자기 사업에서 자신을 떼어낼 수 없었던 사람들이다. 내러티브는 그 분리 불가능성이 밖으로 나오는 방식이며, 그것이 마음을 연다.

AI가 쏟아내는 콘텐츠의 홍수 속에서, 살아낸 이야기는 희소해지고 있다. 희소한 것은 가치가 오른다.

AI는 설득할 수 있다. 마음을 얻는 것은 여전히 사람의 영역이다.

Sources:

• Anthropic, “An update on our model deprecation commitments for Claude Opus 3,” 25 February 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/research/deprecation-updates-opus-3

• Professor Kim Dae-sik, KAIST Department of Electrical Engineering, “The Age of AGI Market Dominance,” lecture, September 2025: https://www.hellodd.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=109201

• Professor Kim Dae-sik, “AI Content Revolution: The Future of Authenticity,” TrendShow 2026, The Miilk: https://themiilk.com/articles/a80a54280

• Murnieks, C. Y., Mosakowski, E. M., & Cardon, M. S. (2014). Pathways of passion: Identity centrality, passion, and behavior among entrepreneurs. Journal of Management, 40(6), 1583–1606. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311433855

Disclaimer: 이 글은 정보 제공 목적으로 작성되었으며, 투자 또는 비즈니스 조언을 구성하지 않습니다. 모든 결정은 독립적인 조사와 적격 자문가와의 상담을 통해 이루어져야 합니다.

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