OpenAI struggles with surging startup demand across Asia-Pacific as Singapore team grows

OpenAI is grappling with surging demand from startups across the Asia-Pacific region as businesses rapidly adopt artificial intelligence, according to Thomas Jeng, the company's head of startups for APAC. In an interview with The Business Times, Jeng said a significant portion of his day is spent triaging and reprioritizing requests. After stepping away for a week, he returned to roughly 800 emails in his inbox.

Jeng's Singapore-based team currently has over 10 members and is actively expanding. OpenAI inked a partnership with the Singapore government in May, committing more than US$300 million and over 200 roles in the city-state over the next few years.

Rather than relying on sales pitches or branding, Jeng said his team focuses on demonstrating model performance directly to startups through side-by-side comparisons. The approach has helped OpenAI win more customers in recent months, he added.

Singapore has emerged as a top-five market globally for OpenAI's coding agent Codex. According to Jeng, Codex adoption has grown roughly 17 times since its release late last year. "I've never seen traction quite like this over the course of my career," he said.

To support the startup ecosystem, OpenAI has extended more than US$30 million in token credits through venture capital firms and in-person hackathons across APAC. The company has also set up a pre-defined budget of several million dollars worth of credits distributed via VCs and accelerator programs.

OpenAI maintains dedicated technical support teams in Singapore and across the region for startups that want closer collaboration. Wealth platform Endowus is among the companies that have tapped into OpenAI's technical expertise to build their products.

Beyond credits and support, Jeng's team actively connects startup founders with potential customers, investors, and partners. The company is also helping Southeast Asian startups explore opportunities in Japan and the US.

On data privacy concerns, Jeng emphasized that OpenAI does not train on data coming through its API, and the company has no access to user input or output. "There's plenty of things that they can build that we are just not going to go and build because of our own limitation," he said. "We can only sustain so many product services at once."