Philippine Tech Startups in 2026 Drive Real Impact and Economic Growth

The rise of startups is redefining the Philippine and global economies through rapid scaling and industry disruption.

The Philippine startup ecosystem may have grown in leaps and bounds during the COVID-19 pandemic - when people were forced to transition to digital - but “we’re now in a six-year low in terms of capital deployed and deals made,” said Celina Durante, head of communications of Kickstart Ventures, a corporate venture capital firm owned by Globe Telecom.

That’s not bad news, she told The Business Manual in an April 8 interview. 

“We call it a healthy reset because investors in startups are more disciplined. Investors…are looking at startups that are profitable and more disciplined in how they operate their businesses.”

Investors are now backing startups that are in it for the long game, she added. “It’s not just about who’s the unicorn. We're looking at startups that actually solve real problems.”

It’s more about sustainability, according to Minette Navarette, managing director of the venture capital firm.

“Is this business going to persist? Is the demand going to be there?” she asked in the same interview. “Is the customer base being developed? Is the company managed well? Are they going to be self-sustaining so they can go for a long time?”

Startups contribute to 3% of the Philippine Nominal Gross Domestic Product and created over 200 thousand jobs in the country, according to a November 2025 report published by venture capital firm Gobi Partners.

Startups can easily develop new solutions because they are small, said Edward Paul Apigo, a senior science research specialist and senior technology transfer officer with the Department of Science and Technology (DOST).

“They're the ones that really address local problems,” he said in a separate April 8 interview. “Yung bigger companies kasi they solve general problems." 

Those who were part of the ecosystem’s early days can recall the short supply of resources for startups and their founders.  Alex and Patrick Gentry, co-founders of Sprout Solutions—a tech company that streamlines human resource processes—lamented the difficulty of finding mentors who could provide the wisdom they needed as a Philippine startup.

“It was just hard to get real, local mentors around that have done it and that have built something. We were really trying to find our footing on how to do things,” Alex Gentry told The Business Manual in a third April 8 interview.

Patrick spoke on the hardship of attracting employees, given the Filipino mindset of wanting to work for established companies rather than up-and-coming ones.

“In the early days of Sprout, we had so many people we interviewed, and they were saying, ‘I’m not really sure because I don’t know if Sprout is a stable company,’” he said.

Navarrete agrees that founders lacked access to information then.

She said that, aside from early players like mobile content providers Entertainment Gateway Group (which Globe Telecom acquired in 2008) and Information Gateway, Inc., “there wasn’t much of a scene” for startups in the Philippines when Kickstart Ventures started in 2012.

Apigo shared that the DOST had its own program that helped startups during those early stages, although the agency had to discontinue it between 2017 and 2018 after the Commission on Audit raised concerns.

At that time, startups had yet to be defined in legislation.

National laws such as the Philippine Innovation Act and the Innovative Startup Act (both enacted in 2019) have since “legitimized” that program, Apigo said.

Interest and investment fueled the ecosystem’s progress in the years that followed, and companies like GrowSari, GCash, and Sprout carved their niches.

“We had an enterprise customer talk to me once at an event, and he was saying... 'We thought we had gone through a digital transformation because we went from a Bundy clock to Excel, so when Sprout came along, we didn’t even have a concept of what we could do with technology,’” Patrick said.