OneByZero Raises $20 Mn as Enterprise AI Moves From Pilots to Production

Singapore-based OneByZero has raised $20 Mn in a Series A led by Jungle Ventures, its first external funding, to scale a business built around a specific enterprise problem: connecting AI models to proprietary data and legacy software while controlling what agents can access, what actions they can take and when a human has to step in.

That is the gap OneByZero is trying to turn into a business. Its engineers work inside customer organisations to move AI from isolated pilots into live workflows, while its NEO platform is designed to govern those deployments once they reach production.

OneByZero’s Series A funding is more than double Southeast Asia’s median Series A of $8 Mn in the first half of 2026, according to a report by Kickstart Ventures and DealStreetAsia.

The company plans to use the funding to expand engineering teams across the nine markets where it already operates, establish a local presence in Japan and accelerate development of NEO, its platform for deploying and governing AI agents, which it calls AI Coworkers. It will also expand beyond financial services and telecommunications into conglomerates, healthcare and the public sector.

OneByZero will build industry-specific templates on NEO and help enterprises develop AI using open-weight and smaller language models. The company did not disclose its valuation or identify other investors in the round.

A Large Bet From Jungle Ventures

Jungle Ventures invests from seed through growth across Southeast Asia and India. The Singapore-based venture firm says its typical initial cheque ranges from $500,000 to $20 Mn, putting OneByZero’s entire round at the top end of that range. However, Jungle has not disclosed how much it invested.

Yash Sankrityayan, managing partner at Jungle Ventures, said OneByZero was “already doing what much of the enterprise AI market is still talking about”, pointing to three years of deployments inside large organisations.

He added that more enterprises across Asia-Pacific and Japan are moving AI from experimentation into core operations, which fits Jungle’s bet on deploying AI models instead of building them.

From Models to Enterprise Systems

OneByZero’s forward-deployed engineers work with enterprise teams to identify specific workflows, connect AI models to existing data and software, set rules for what agents can access or do and define when human approval is required.

NEO is the control layer for those deployments. According to OneByZero, it manages permissions, records agent activity and routes defined decisions back to employees.

The company says it has deployed AI across financial services, telecommunications and retail and that revenue has more than doubled annually over the past three years, but has not disclosed its financials.

OneByZero also said its deployments have helped enterprises automate more than 90% of some customer-facing interactions and accelerate the delivery of complex data modernisation projects by 50%. The company disclosed those figures, but Entrepreneur APAC could not independently verify them.

OneByZero presents NEO as the layer that governs how AI is used inside existing enterprise systems and does not compete with foundation model developers.

Of AWS, OpenAI and Japan

The funding follows a deeper push into the ecosystems of major AI and cloud providers.

OneByZero was named an OpenAI Select Partner in August. In September, it signed a three-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services to expand governed AI deployments across Asia-Pacific and Japan.

The company says it builds on AWS. NEO uses Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s service for building applications using AI models, and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, its tools for deploying and operating AI agents, inside customers’ AWS environments.

OneByZero currently operates in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, the US and Vietnam. Japan will be its next market, with the company planning to build a local team there.

The Scalability Test

The funding comes against a venture market where headline capital has recovered faster than deal activity. Southeast Asian start-ups raised $7.25 Bn across 217 transactions in the first half of 2026, up from $3.5 Bn in the previous six months, according to the Kickstart Ventures-DealStreetAsia report. But a single $4.5 Bn Series C for Singapore-headquartered data centre operator DayOne was larger than the entire increase.

Excluding DayOne, funding declined 21% to $2.75 Bn. Deal count was the lowest in any half-year since 2018. For OneByZero, however, the more immediate question is whether it can repeat the same deployment model without each customer becoming a new engineering project.

Its approach depends on engineers working closely with individual enterprises, particularly where AI has to interact with sensitive data, legacy systems and controlled workflows. NEO and the industry templates OneByZero plans to build are intended to standardise more of that work from one deployment to the next.

The next test is whether OneByZero can turn that hands-on deployment model into a business that scales across markets, industries and customers without becoming a conventional services operation.