🧋 Hello human and artificial friends,

2025 is the first real year of AI-led hacking and the numbers are wild.

📈 Phishing attacks have jumped +4,151% since ChatGPT launched and deepfake scams have more than doubled.

AI attackers can run 24/7, fix their own errors, and break into systems in minutes. One recent case took only 51 seconds from first contact to full control.

Welcome to the new reality where cybercrime is no longer human vs human but AI vs AI.

Asia is where AI moves fastest. New products, new habits, new ways of using tech show up every week. Most disappear, but some quietly change how people shop, learn, travel, or create. We pick those ideas so you can study them and build your own version.

The asiabits office is basically Zootopia. Our cat Meimei rules the sofa.
Einstein and Yumi run security.

👉🏻 So whenever we see real innovation for pets, we pay attention.

While still working at Huami, one of the biggest smartwatch makers in the world, two executives noticed something odd.

Humans wear watches that track heart rate, sleep, and stress in real time. Pets, meanwhile, still rely on simple GPS collars that only beep when a dog leaves the yard.

So they built SATELLAI, a smart collar that brings the logic of Apple Watch and Fitbit to animals. 👇🏻

Three months after launch, they generated several million dollars in North America and won their category on Amazon Prime Day.

✅ Pets finally get real behavioural data

SATELLAI uses movement, posture and sound patterns to detect stress, illness or abnormal behaviour.
Not just tracking but actual interpretation.
It warns owners early, before a problem becomes expensive or dangerous.

✅ Smarter geofencing with fewer false alarms

Instead of the usual on/off GPS alerts, SATELLAI learns each dog’s habits.
It adjusts the sensitivity automatically, so owners only get alerts that matter.

✅ A data flywheel that insurers want

The breakthrough moment: SATELLAI signed a partnership with Fetch Pet Insurance.
Their health data feeds into risk models and enables personalised premiums.
This is one of the first deep integrations of AI hardware into pet insurance.

💡 Vertical wearables for underserved groups
Everything that worked for humans (sleep tracking, stress detection, early warnings) can be ported to new species, new industries, new niches.

💡 Insurance-enabled hardware
Any device that collects continuous behavioural data can become a pricing engine for insurers. Health, home, agriculture, mobility.

💡 High-trust premium hardware from China, sold in the West
SATELLAI proves the model: strong supply chain, iterative hardware, sold through Amazon, amplified through US partnerships.

AI is rewriting what consumers pay for.
Products that turn real-world signals into smart actions around safety, health and cost will shape the next decade.

If you build in this space, this idea might help you cash in on what you already know.

Now through the end of the year is prime streaming time on Roku, with viewers spending 3.5 hours each day streaming content and shopping online. Roku Ads Manager simplifies campaign setup, lets you segment audiences, and provides real-time reporting. And, you can test creative variants and run shoppable ads to drive purchases directly on-screen.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

🇺🇸 Trump reopens the chip tap to China: President Donald Trump says Nvidia can resume selling its H200 AI chips to approved customers in China, reversing the Biden-era ban on advanced exports. The deal includes a 25 % cut to the US and excludes Nvidia’s newest Blackwell and Rubin lines, which stay domestic only. Analysts say the move hands China a meaningful compute upgrade, since the H200 is far more capable than the weakened H20 chips previously allowed under US controls.

📱 Users love the AI phone, apps not so much: ByteDance has scaled back its Doubao assistant after major apps blocked the phone’s voice-driven features. Platforms like Taobao, Alipay and Pinduoduo restricted actions triggered by the agent, prompting ByteDance to disable AI control for payments, games and incentive schemes. The Nubia M153 sold out on launch, but users report logins freezing or accounts being limited when Doubao operates other apps. ByteDance says it is working with developers on clearer rules for agentic phones.

🇰🇷 South Korea uses AI to age missing children: Authorities are generating lifelike images of long-term missing children to show what they might look like decades later. The NCRC and KAIST have already updated posters for sixty cases, using super-resolution tech to map typical aging patterns onto the last known childhood photos. The refreshed images have led to new public tips, and the project now includes video recreations that show each child walking as both a child and an adult to spark recognition.

AI plus city support is turning solo founders into real companies. “One-person companies” (OPC) get space, compute and services. The tool stack they use handles marketing, content, invoicing, meetings and simple agents.

🛠️ Tool stack: With AI, a solo founder can launch a product from a single prompt.

Create visuals, video and music, draft copy, and prototype apps with off-the-shelf tools: Youchuan (image), Jimeng (text-to-video), Suno, Splash Music, Udio (audio), Gemini 3 and similar chat models. Typical spend: CNY 500–1,000/month.

Tools to run your organization:

That’s the survival rate of South Korean AI startups after three years.

🤖 Fast start, early exit: Most make it through year one, but many struggle to build real market traction and scale sustainably in the following years. The survival rate is well below general AI firms (72.7%) and the overall industry average (68.8%).

💰 Subsidies instead of sales: Nearly a quarter of their R&D cash comes from the state instead of customers (industry: 5.7%), with only ~USD 400,000 R&D spend per year. Most Korean AI startups are more grant-powered than market-proven.

Watch: Korea wants to become an AI superpower, but the foundation is fragile. If 2026 truly becomes the industry’s “judgment year,” when hype turns into hard validation, many subsidy-dependent startups may not survive the shakeout.

🖌️ Lovart.ai Studio is an AI-powered design agent that transform ideas into high-quality visuals and posters faster than any traditional design workflow.

🧱 Dora.run is an AI website builder built for speed, turning simple prompts into fully functional, production-ready web apps in minutes.

🎨 DesignKit (美图设计室) allows brands to seamlessly insert products into lifestyle images and videos with real humans using them.

🧪 ChemLex opens a robot-run drug lab in Singapore: The Shanghai startup launched an AI-powered chemistry facility that runs 800 experiments a day and cuts drug discovery timelines from months to days. ChemLex has raised 80 million USD and already works with more than 70 pharma clients worldwide.

⚙️ A chip so tough it wants its own IPO: Korean gallium oxide chip maker PowerCubeSemi raised 4.4 million USD in pre-IPO funding and is now moving toward a 2026 listing. The company operates the first mass-production fab for Ga₂O₃, a material valued for handling far higher voltages and heat than silicon. These efficient materials are increasingly important in the broader AI infrastructure race.

🎓 Shanghai’s Fudan University launches 100 million USD deeptech fund: The university introduced a new overseas fund to back early-stage spinouts in AI, life sciences, new energy and advanced materials. It aims to be the first investor behind campus-founded startups and help accelerate lab-to-market transitions, a pipeline that increasingly shapes China’s AI and deeptech ecosystem.

BITS TO DO

✅ Find out your future with this AI Tarot Card Reader.
✅ Read about the coolest things Reddit users have done or seen with AI.
✅ Find the right AI tool for any task to start your solo founder journey.
✅ Generate an AI picture using Nano Banana and this 500+ prompt collection.
✅ Become smarter by reading AI for Dummies.*

_{*Yes, it’s an affiliate link. No, you won’t pay more. But it helps support asiabits. Thanks :)}

Even AI knows what tastes right.
If cats could cook, they would definitely make Sichuan food. 😋

Career Bits

🌏 Shopee: GRIT Trainee - Data Analyst Trainee, Singapore

🌏 A*STAR: Data Analyst (Planning & Policy), Singapore

🌏 AstraZeneca: Development Innovation Analyst, Shanghai

🌏 Cadence Design Systems: ML / AI Software Engineer, Shanghai

🌏 McKinsey & Company: Knowledge Analyst – Life Sciences, Shanghai

🌏 Dassault Systèmes: SaaS Sales Expert (Graduate Program), Beijing

🌏 HK Express: Specialist Business Insights, Shenzhen

🌏 NVIDIA: Developer Technology Engineer – AI, Shanghai

🌏 Shopee Product Manager – AI Intelligence (2026 Graduate), Singapore

🌏 Red Alpha Cyber AI Engineer (Digital Training Programme), Singapore