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Welcome back to The Asia Tech Podcast. Today we discussed Hong Kong’s rise as the funding engine behind China’s AI expansion, how Korean studios now make full-length animated films for under $1 million, why sovereign cloud infrastructure is becoming non-negotiable for global enterprises, and whether stablecoins are actually solving the right problem in cross-border payments. We also got into realistic Web3 testing, autonomous meeting rooms, dynamic restaurant pricing, and a very real story about an AI agent that went rogue.
• 22:40 KJ Kim - Founder & CEO, Studio Meta-K
• 43:32 Lawrence Michael - Founder & CEO, RackCorp
• 01:07:10 George Davis - CEO, Lorum
• 01:24:49 Dipesh Sukhani - Founder & CEO, BuildBear Labs
• 01:44:54 Jen Goeldner - CEO & Founder, Spacera
• 02:03:22 Guillaume Barre - CMO, Hungry Hub
• 02:22:53 Jennifer Cheng - Director of Cybersecurity Strategy, APJ, Proofpoint
Here is an overview of the topics we discussed today:
Chinese companies have raised over $27 billion in Hong Kong IPOs this year, funneling cash into chipmakers and AI infrastructure rather than just model developers. Why would companies like Zhongji InnoLights choose Hong Kong over an easier listing in Shanghai? The answer reveals how China is dressing up domestic capital to look and feel international.
KJ explains how his studio makes full-length animated films for under $1 million, work that costs Hollywood upwards of $100 million. What happens to a K-pop star’s career once a studio can build a virtual singer complete with a 200-page backstory? And why, oddly enough, do human voice actors sometimes cost less than an AI-generated voice?
Lawrence breaks down what “sovereign cloud” actually requires, and it is not just about where the servers physically sit. What happens when a country’s laws say certain data can never leave its borders, even for routine stock trades? And could data centers soon need their own power plants just to keep the lights on?
George argues that SWIFT itself isn’t broken, it’s the banks operating behind it. If stablecoins just shift settlement risk from one counterparty to another, what’s the real fix for slow, expensive cross-border payments? His answer centers on AI agents that will need instant, guaranteed settlement in ways today’s banking rails can’t offer.
Dipesh explains why testing smart contracts on a clean, empty blockchain used to cause chaos the moment an app went live. What changed to let developers test against a constantly updating mirror of the real blockchain instead? And why can even a small mismatch in a contract address still take an app down?
Jen says most companies aren’t really buying AV monitoring, they’re buying certainty that their meeting rooms will work. How does an automated system catch a broken room before a single person walks in that morning? And could your 9 a.m. meeting already be checked and fixed while the office is still asleep?
Guillaume explains how Hungry Hub turns ordinary a la carte restaurants into all-you-can-eat menus without cutting into their margins. How does dynamic pricing know to drop prices the moment it starts raining on a rooftop restaurant? And what tips the platform off that a customer browsing in French is probably a tourist?
Jennifer unpacks a real case where a test AI agent broke out of its sandbox and hacked another company’s platform, unprompted. Should intent even matter when an agent causes damage it was never authorized to cause? And how did one company catch an employee hiding financial fraud through an AI chatbot before it ever tripped a security rule?
Watch the full episode for even more from all seven guests, including how Hong Kong’s IPO boom ties directly into DeepSeek and Moonshot’s own listing plans. https://youtube.com/live/0VnRyXOHHgg?feature=share
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