AI Weekly Malaysia

TechCrunch recaps PearX's latest bi-annual demo day, held in San Francisco the week before October 5, 2026, where Pear VC's 12-week program capped its batch at 20 startups and 16 presented. PearX differs from Y Combinator by not offering standard terms, investing as much as $2 million, and keeping participants under wraps until demo day; past cohorts produced Known (voice AI for dating, backed by Forerunner) and Andera (audit/compliance automation, $37M Series A from Lightspeed this summer). Of the five buzzy companies, only two are described in the excerpt: Speridlabs, which builds spatial foundational models for robotics, gaming and VFX and claims its Mundus model is a '3D Midjourney' because geometry stays persistent when a part is changed (competitors named: Runway, Odyssey, Google's Genie), and Saia, which is building a fast, cost-efficient inference chip — the text cuts off there.

Why: There is no Malaysia or Southeast Asia angle in this piece, so treat it as a benchmark rather than news: it shows what US pre-seed/seed VCs are paying attention to, and that PearX's terms are non-standard and can reach $2M, which is a materially different deal shape from a standard accelerator package. If you are weighing accelerator applications, the concrete comparison here is PearX's small cohort (20, with 16 presenting) and up-to-$2M cheques versus YC's standard terms — worth pricing out before you apply. The excerpt only names two of the five companies, so do not treat this as a full map of the batch.