🧋 Hello human and artificial friends,

A Japanese woman who ended a real three-year engagement has now “married” an AI partner created with ChatGPT, using AR glasses to exchange rings in a digital ceremony.

The asiabits team sends warm congratulations and wishes the happy couple many stable software updates.

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.

Today’s idea

Asia is where AI moves fastest. New products, new habits, and 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.

Today’s idea

After years at TikTok, Yu Beichuan noticed something strange.

It was easy for the platform to deliver the perfect video to the perfect audience, but finding the right partner, expert, or candidate for a deal or project was painfully slow. So he built the tool he always wished existed: Lessie AI.

Lessie AI is a People Search agent.
It turns finding the right person, the hardest part of business outreach, into a 10-minute task.
Think of it as ZoomInfo ➕ Apollo ➕ Clay ➕ LinkedIn combined with a researcher who works nonstop and follows one instruction at a time.

✅ It solves a real daily pain: Most teams waste hours jumping between LinkedIn, Google, CRM tools, and random spreadsheets. Lessie bundles everything into one place and cuts the search down to minutes.

✅ It understands intent: You can describe a situation instead of typing exact job titles or filters.

Example:

✅ It has more data than Western tools: Because it combines public sources with partner databases across Asia, Europe, and niche SaaS tools.
Apollo gives email lists.
Lessie gives real people with context.

✅ It closes the loop: It not only finds the person but also drafts the first email, adjusts tone, fills in details, and sends it.

✅ It is built for speed: The founder comes from ByteDance, the TikTok mother company, where “ship fast or too late” is a religion.
The product went from code to global launch in three months and already passed 100k users.

A western Lessie for one vertical
Pick one niche with messy people data and go deep: biotech, climate, gaming, D2C, Shopify, robotics, venture.
Do for one category what Lessie tries to do for all.

A verification layer
Lessie sometimes mixes domains or misjudges expertise.
A business that validates and enriches results for accuracy could become the “truth layer” for all people search agents.

Outreach tools for messy, real-world cases
Most outreach software only works for clean datasets. Build a tool that takes rough inputs like screenshots, PDF exports, event lists, or old CRM dumps and turns them into usable contact leads.

The phonebook went digital.
Now it is becoming intelligent.

If you move early, you can own a market that LinkedIn left wide open.

🏚️ Japan turns to satellite imagery and AI to locate abandoned homes: Startups like Where Inc process high-resolution satellite data with a model that spots aging roofs by analysing colour shifts, rust patterns and texture breaks. The system is adapted from crater-detection technology developed within JAXA’s research ecosystem, allowing large areas to be scanned automatically. This makes long-neglected properties visible, including homes left empty for over a decade that can change hands for as little as 1 yen.

🚛 Alibaba bets on agentic AI to overhaul global sourcing: The company is rolling out an agent-based system on Alibaba.com that automates the entire procurement workflow by interpreting product specs, identifying suitable suppliers, checking documents and comparing quotes. The technology breaks sourcing into autonomous tasks executed in real time, compressing a process that usually takes weeks into under an hour. The launch comes as orders from Europe surge and the region becomes Alibaba’s fastest-rising market after the US.

🚄 JR Central trials AI language support for Shinkansen travellers: At Shinagawa Station, a pilot for JRTok-AI is underway, offering multilingual assistance that fuses real-time schedule and ticket data with location signals. Visitors access the service via a QR code and receive guidance on luggage rules, connections and ticket options, along with automatically triggered cultural and historical commentary along the Tokaido Shinkansen route. The trial is aimed at improving support for international visitors.

Software creation shifts from dev-only to everyone. Non-coders can ship internal tools and niche apps in hours, compressing time-to-market and expanding experimentation.

💡China lights the fuse: Ant Group’s newest release LingGuang is a “flash app” that turns a plain-language idea into a working mini app in about 30 seconds.

🌎 Global momentum: Vibe-coding pioneer Replit shows real revenue of ~$100M ARR. Roughly 25% of new founders let AI write >95% of their codebase and Google searches for “vibe coding” surged ~6,700% this year.

🔎 Reality check and risks: Analysts flag a traffic slowdown; “prompt-and-pray” creates tech debt. AppSec company Veracode finds security issues in ~45% of AI-generated code.

That’s how much Foxconn plans to pour into AI every year over the next 3–5 years.

🧠 AI eats the CapEx: Foxconn’s AI spend will account for more than half of its roughly $5B annual capex. Its cloud & networking arm has already beaten consumer electronics revenue for two straight quarters.

🖥️ AI factories in overdrive: Foxconn is Nvidia’s most important manufacturer of AI server racks. Scaled up, the company can install up to 1.5 million GPUs per year — more capacity than many countries have in their entire data-center fleets.

Watch: Foxconn is positioning itself as the backbone of national AI stacks: local manufacturing for “data sovereignty,” talks with Japan about AI and EV investments, and optionality in quantum and robotics.

🧺 Pebblely turns simple product photos into polished, studio-quality visuals within seconds, giving even small brands a professional look.

👗 ProBoost Visual Try-On lets customers slip into outfits without physically trying them on, increasing confidence and reducing returns.

🎨 insMind builds entire product scenes out of thin air. Beach vibes, winter magic or sci-fi neon alley. Your product appears perfectly staged in any world you imagine.

💊 UltraGreen.ai to build AI-powered surgical intelligence platform: The medtech firm UltraGreen aims for a Singapore IPO to raise about $400 million and achieve a market capitalization of around $1.6 billion.

📡 Korea’s AI mapmaker Dabeeo goes global: Korea’s Dabeeo has raised $8.1 million to scale its military-grade geospatial AI engine across defense, government management, and Southeast Asia, where it powers plantation monitoring software.

🤖 China’s Robotera levels up: The humanoid robot maker raised $140.5 million led by Geely, pushing total funding to USD 253M as its ERA-42 robots roll out across logistics, factories, and commercial services worldwide.

BITS TO DO

✅ Order this AI Self Developing Kit.*
✅ Download the current report on China's national AI strategy.
✅ Read why India’s AI startups are achieving the highest valuations in Asia.
✅ Secure tickets for Japan’s largest AI conference.
✅ Learn what goes down in 48 hours in the world's most futuristic city.

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

🌏 Shopee: Global Leader Program (GLP) - Tech Track, Jakarta

🌏 ASML: Computer Science internship, Taiwan

🌏 SAP: AI Engineer Intern, Shanghai

🌏 KMS: Mobile Software Engineer Intern, HCMC

🌏 Visa: Software Engineer (Crypto), Singapore

🌏 TymeX: Senior Python / PySpark Data & AI Analytics Engineer, HCMC

🌏 PayPal: Software Engineer, Singapore

🌏 Axelspace: C++ Software Engineer (Satellite Systems), Tokyo

🌏 ExaWizards: Fullstack Engineer (GenAI Product team), Tokyo

🌏 NCS Group: Junior Amazon Connect Solutions Associate, Singapore

Recently our team binged through a Star Wars movie marathon.
Somehow we had it differently in mind…anyways a recommended classic!