Singapore Fintech Funding Falls to Decade Low, But Crypto Deal Count Holds Up

Singapore's fintech sector drew just over $499 million in investment across 53 deals in the first half of 2026, according to KPMG's Pulse of Fintech H1'2026 report, published August 28. That is down sharply from roughly $1.45 billion across 97 deals in the first half of 2025, and marks the weakest first half the country has recorded in close to a decade.

The decline was uneven within the half itself. A quiet first quarter brought in about $88 million across 26 deals, before activity rebounded to $411 million across 27 deals in the second quarter. That recovery rested almost entirely on a single $320 million round for a cross-border payments platform in June, which alone accounted for close to two-thirds of Singapore's total fintech investment for the half.

"The headline number tells only part of the story," said Anton Ruddenklau, partner and head of financial services at KPMG in Singapore. "What we are seeing in Singapore mirrors the global market — investors are being far more selective, consolidating capital behind a small number of scaled, high-conviction platforms rather than funding behaviour we saw in prior years."

Ruddenklau added that Singapore's regulatory environment, cross-border connectivity, and strength in payments and digital assets remain the areas where capital is still flowing.

Digital assets and cryptocurrency accounted for the largest share of Singapore's deal count of any vertical, with 27 of the half's 53 deals, though total disclosed value across those deals was a comparatively modest $95.5 million. Fifteen of the 27 crypto and blockchain deals were concentrated at seed and early stage, weighted toward exchange, brokerage and cross-chain tooling platforms, while the larger, later-stage names centred on regulated market infrastructure such as digital-asset services providers and crypto payments firms. KPMG framed the pattern as a sign of continued confidence in Singapore as a base for regulated, institutional-grade digital-asset businesses, even though the sector's weight in the market currently rests on young companies rather than proven, scaled ones.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning was the most active vertical overall, appearing in 18 of the 53 deals and accounting for $365.9 million in disclosed value, split evenly between early and late-stage rounds. The later-stage AI deals clustered around software already embedded in financial workflows, including cross-border payments, investment research, insurance claims and credit-risk modelling, while the earlier-stage cohort skewed toward agentic execution platforms, agentic networks and cross-chain automation, alongside broader AI-and-crypto tooling. KPMG said that shift suggests investors expect autonomous, AI-driven agents to become core infrastructure for how money moves and how financial decisions are executed, a thesis that increasingly overlaps with the stablecoin and tokenization projects Singapore-based institutions have been building throughout 2026.

Singapore's slowdown mirrored a broader divergence in the global fintech market. Total global fintech investment across venture capital, private equity and M&A rose from $72.2 billion in the second half of 2025 to $103.1 billion in the first half of 2026, putting the sector on pace for its strongest annual performance in four years, even as global deal volume fell from 2,500 to 2,100 over the same period. The Americas captured more than 80% of that global total, with the US alone accounting for $80.8 billion across 933 deals, while fintech investment across the broader Asia-Pacific region declined to $4.6 billion across 350 deals, down from $7.1 billion in the second half of 2025. Singapore's single concentrated mega-round is, in KPMG's framing, a local version of the same global pattern: fewer deals, larger checks, and a clear premium on companies with already-proven business models.