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In early 2018, Yujun Chean and Prateek Jogani were selling car insurance with a cashback twist. Their Singapore startup, Vouch Insurtech, had just raised SGD1 million (then US$755,000) in seed funding as the parent of Thai insurtech FairDee. Eight years on, the pair are back with a much bigger cheque and a far more crowded market.

Their new company, Parallel Loop, has launched with US$6.6 million in seed funding led by Bengaluru-based 3one4 Capital. Picus Capital, Flourish Ventures and Economic Development Innovations Singapore (EDIS) also joined, alongside three high-profile angels: Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED founder Kunal Shah, and Philip Yeo, former chairman of Singapore’s Economic Development Board and A*STAR.

Also Read: Everyone is talking about AI adoption. But are enterprises actually ready for it?

Founded only in June 2026, Parallel Loop calls itself an “AI operating partner” for mid-market and large enterprises. Four months in, it has 30 staff across Singapore, Bengaluru, Bangkok, London and Dubai, and more than 10 clients. These include Indian meat-delivery firm Licious, electricals maker Havells and Tokio Marine Safety Insurance (Thailand). Chean told e27 that Singapore enterprises, including a local healthcare group, are also on the list.

“Our aim is to build a global AI company,” he said.

The gap it is chasing

The pitch rests on a problem most enterprise leaders will recognise. AI tools have made individual employees faster, but turning that into a company-wide capability is far harder. The rules, definitions and know-how that make a business tick are scattered across systems, meetings, inboxes and chat apps. A model that cannot see that context is a clever intern who skipped onboarding.

“Intelligence has become abundant. What many organisations lack is the context, systems and capability to turn this into tangible business outcomes,” said Jogani.

The diagnosis fits the region. Southeast Asia, the argument increasingly goes, does not have an AI adoption problem so much as a scaling problem, and most enterprise AI in APAC is still stuck in the proof-of-concept room.

Three products, one bet

Parallel Loop’s offering has three parts:

• AI Enablement works with leadership teams to identify high-value use cases and build roadmaps.
• The AI Stack is a modular platform that connects a client’s existing systems with its organisational context. It powers everything from live dashboards to deterministic workflows, meaning automations that produce the same result every time rather than the varied output typical of generative models.
• The Software Factory pairs forward-deployed engineers with AI agents to modernise legacy systems and build new applications. Those forward-deployed engineers are the centre of gravity. Popularised by Palantir, the model embeds a vendor’s engineers inside client teams instead of handing over software and walking away.

The stack runs in the client’s own cloud or on premises, with data residency set by the client. It works with multiple model providers, including open-weight models, and keeps an audit trail of prompts, responses, context changes and actions. Clients retain ownership of their data and of the work built for them. That speaks directly to the regional appetite for sovereign AI, where, as one recent analysis argued, sovereignty starts long before the model itself.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia cannot build sovereign AI on borrowed choices

Licious is the showcase client. Co-founder Abhay Hanjura said the company set out this year to become “fully AI-native”. He said teams across every function now use Parallel Loop daily as “a shared intelligence layer across the organisation”.

A familiar founding duo

The founders’ track record goes a long way towards explaining why investors moved so quickly. Jogani and Chean have worked together for nearly a decade. After Qoala acquired FairDee in 2021, Jogani became Group CTO and Chean Group COO of the Indonesian insurtech.

Qoala grew into five markets, processing millions of policies a month, and raised more than US$130 million from investors, including a US$65 million Series B in 2022. Jogani, who brings around two decades of technology experience, began running hands-on AI programmes for leadership teams in 2025. He noticed that many teams were adopting AI tools, but few were building the systems and processes needed to sustain the gains.

“They’re closing enterprise deals and expanding accounts across multiple geographies with an outcome-led approach,” said Anurag Ramdasan, Partner at 3one4 Capital.

A crowded field

Parallel Loop is walking into a brawl. Global consultancies such as Accenture and Deloitte sell AI transformation programmes to the same boardrooms. AI labs, including OpenAI, have built forward-deployed engineering teams of their own to win enterprise accounts, and Palantir still sets the template. Closer to home, Singtel’s RE:AI has partnered the SIT-NVIDIA centre to tackle the enterprise AI deployment gap.

The model also carries a familiar risk. Forward-deployed engineers are expensive, and the more a startup leans on them, the more it resembles a consultancy: software margins on the pitch deck, services margins on the books. Thirty people serving more than 10 clients across five cities in four months is fast. Whether the AI Stack becomes a reusable product, or each engagement turns bespoke, will decide whether Parallel Loop is valued as a software company or a services firm.

Also Read: Singapore firms embrace agentic AI, but audit trails remain thin

There is a quieter tension, too. A stack that promises no model lock-in also makes it easier for clients to walk away once the capability is built in-house.

For now, the founders have the network, the cheque and a client list that spans three countries. The harder test is whether enterprises that have been told to stop automating broken processes and calling it AI transformation will pay someone to fix the process first.

The post Parallel Loop nets US$6.6M to sell enterprises the one thing AI models lack: context appeared first on e27.