Where is the next Filipino unicorn?

By Janvie Soqueña Amido

The Philippines has no shortage of ideas. Walk into a university innovation fair, attend a startup pitching competition, or sit down with young entrepreneurs over coffee, and you will hear ideas that are clever, ambitious, and sometimes genuinely disruptive. Yet one uncomfortable question remains: Where is the next Filipino unicorn?

A unicorn is a privately held startup valued at more than USD 1 billion. For the Philippines, this is no longer an impossible dream. Mynt, the company behind GCash, became the country’s first unicorn, while Voyager Innovations, the company behind Maya, later crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark as well. We have therefore answered one important question: yes, Filipinos can build billion-dollar companies. The harder question is why we are not producing more of them.

The Philippines does not have an ideas problem. We have a scale problem.

For years, our entrepreneurship ecosystem has become incredibly good at helping people start. We organize boot camps, seminars, bazaars, hackathons, pitching competitions, and mentoring programs. Government agencies proudly report how many MSMEs were trained, how many startups were assisted, and how many participants completed entrepreneurship programs. These initiatives matter, but eventually, we have to ask: What happens after the pitch? Who writes the first serious check? Who takes a founder with a promising PHP 1 million company and helps build it into a PHP 10 million company, then PHP 100 million, then PHP 1 billion? Who helps that entrepreneur enter Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the United States, or the wider global market?

This is where looking at countries with stronger startup ecosystems becomes useful. Singapore did not become one of the world’s leading startup hubs simply because Singaporeans suddenly became more entrepreneurial. It deliberately constructed an ecosystem around entrepreneurs. Through Startup SG Equity, the Singapore government co-invests alongside qualified private investors in promising technology companies. Instead of the government merely saying, “Here is a grant. Good luck,” the philosophy is much closer to: if private investors are prepared to take a calculated risk on a promising company, the government is prepared to share part of that risk. Singapore has built an environment containing thousands of technology startups, hundreds of investors, and a strong network of incubators, accelerators, and international connections. More importantly, startups are not merely encouraged to begin; they are given pathways to scale.

South Korea offers another lesson. Its TIPS program allows experienced private investors to identify promising technology startups first. Investors put their own money into these companies, after which the government can provide additional research and commercialization support. The idea is refreshingly practical: the government does not pretend that bureaucrats are necessarily better venture capitalists than venture capitalists. It combines private-sector judgment with public resources. South Korea has gone further through Scale-Up TIPS, connecting research and development support with investment for companies ready to grow. It has also deliberately created incentives for startup development outside the Seoul metropolitan area.

That last point should make those of us outside Metro Manila pay attention. Why shouldn’t Iloilo, Cebu, Bacolod, Davao, and Cagayan de Oro have serious pathways for high-potential startups? Why must an ambitious Filipino founder eventually believe that capital, investors, technology talent, and opportunity are concentrated somewhere else? If South Korea can deliberately encourage innovation outside Seoul, perhaps the Philippines should become equally serious about building regional startup capitals.

The United States provides another important lesson: research must have a pathway toward commercialization. Through America’s Seed Fund and programs such as SBIR and STTR, billions of dollars in competitive early-stage research and development support have historically been directed toward small, innovative companies. The philosophy matters. Promising technologies should not necessarily have to prove commercial success before receiving serious support. Sometimes the government must help promising ideas cross the dangerous distance between invention and market.

Compare that with what too often happens inside our universities. Students develop software, create prototypes, conduct scientific research, build technologies, and defend impressive theses. Then graduation comes. The prototype goes into storage, the thesis goes onto a library shelf, and everyone moves on. What if an exceptional thesis could instead move from research to prototype, prototype to intellectual property, intellectual property to startup, startup to investment, and investment to company? That is how an innovation economy should think.

This is also why we must rethink how we finance ambition. Traditional lending understandably asks for collateral, profitability, revenue, and operating history. But an early-stage technology company may have very little of these. Its greatest assets might be software, intellectual property, data, an algorithm, a new business model, or simply an extraordinary founding team solving a massive problem. How do you collateralize an idea? You cannot. That is precisely why serious startup ecosystems require angel investors, venture capital, co-investment mechanisms, corporate venture funds, and research financing.

We cannot keep telling Filipino entrepreneurs to dream big while giving them financial instruments designed to keep them small.

There is nothing wrong with microenterprise. A small business that supports a family and employs several people makes a meaningful contribution to society. But we should stop treating every entrepreneur as though the ultimate objective is simply to remain a microenterprise. Some entrepreneurs want to employ 1,000 people. Some want to serve 10 million customers. Some want to expand throughout Southeast Asia. And perhaps a handful have the capacity to build the next billion-dollar Filipino company. Our ecosystem must have a lane for them.

Government should also reconsider how we measure entrepreneurship. We count participants. We count seminars. We count startups assisted. We count certificates distributed. Those numbers are useful for accomplishment reports, but they do not necessarily tell us whether businesses are becoming stronger. What if we started measuring how many startups survived for three years? How many raised PHP 50 million? How many reached PHP 100 million in revenue? How many employed 100 people? How many exported? How many commercialized intellectual property? How many secured Series A or Series B financing? How many eventually became unicorns? Activity is not the same as impact.

And perhaps Iloilo should begin asking these questions now. Imagine if Iloilo deliberately identified its 10 most promising startups every year — not necessarily those with the most attractive booths or polished presentations, but companies with the potential to solve enormous problems and address enormous markets. Surround them with investors, universities, accountants, lawyers, technologists, corporations, and experienced entrepreneurs. Give them access to customers. Give them research support. Give them capital. Give them connections to ASEAN markets. Most importantly, give them reasons to build their companies here.

Imagine established Ilonggo businesses allocating even a small portion of their investment portfolios to promising local startups. Imagine major corporations becoming their first customers. Imagine universities becoming engines of commercialization. Imagine the government matching qualified private investment in high-potential regional companies. That would no longer be another entrepreneurship project. That would be an economic development strategy.

Of course, not every startup will succeed. Some will fail, and some will fail spectacularly. This is uncomfortable, particularly when government or institutional money is involved. But innovation without failure is a fantasy. Singapore, South Korea, and the United States understood something we must become more comfortable accepting: if we want extraordinary outcomes, we must tolerate calculated risk. The objective is not for every Filipino startup to become a unicorn. The objective is to create an ecosystem where becoming one is actually possible.

And our greatest opportunities may already be staring us in the face. Agricultural inefficiency, health care accessibility, logistics across more than 7,000 islands, MSME digitization, education, climate resilience, financial inclusion, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence are usually discussed as Philippine problems. An entrepreneur might look at the same problems and see billion-dollar markets. GCash is an instructive example. Its significance was not simply that somebody created another application. It addressed the enormous challenge of making financial services accessible and useful to millions of Filipinos. Great startups do not merely create products; they solve large problems at extraordinary scale.

The next Filipino unicorn will not arrive wearing a sign announcing that it will someday be worth USD 1 billion. It might currently consist of three people working around a borrowed table. It might begin with a university student holding a prototype. It might be the vision of a millennial founder repeatedly rejected by investors. It might even be somewhere in Iloilo right now.

So perhaps “Where is the next Filipino unicorn?” is not really a question for entrepreneurs. It is a question for the rest of us. If that founder appeared before us today, would our financial system know how to finance the idea? Would the government know how to support its scale? Would universities know how to commercialize its technology? Would corporations become its first major customers? Would wealthy Filipinos invest before its success became obvious?

Singapore learned to share the risk. South Korea learned to connect private investment with public research and development. The United States learned to put serious resources behind technologies long before their commercial success was guaranteed. The Philippines does not have to copy any of these countries wholesale, but we should understand the principle connecting them: unicorns are built by entrepreneurs, but ecosystems determine how many entrepreneurs get the chance to build one.

We already have the ideas. We already have the talent. We have even proven that Filipinos can build billion-dollar companies. Now comes the harder question: Are we willing to build an ecosystem as ambitious as the entrepreneurs we keep telling to dream big?