Asia
Asia Leaders
Nikhil Kamath Turned Market Access Into a Media Platform. Influence Now Needs Clearer Boundaries
A FigureAsia examination of how Nikhil Kamath is turning Kamath's expansion from broking and asset management into a large interview and investing platform that shapes how young Indians understand markets, founders and public policy into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Lucy Guo Built Passes Around Creator Ownership. Trust Must Become the Subscription Advantage
A FigureAsia examination of how Lucy Guo is turning Passes' attempt to scale a direct-to-fan subscription platform while Guo's retained Scale AI stake gives her unusual financial independence as an operator into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Shashank Kumar Is Rewiring Razorpay Around Payment Success. Reliability Has to Pay
A FigureAsia examination of how Shashank Kumar is turning Razorpay's attempt to use routing, passkeys and infrastructure software to reduce failed transactions across India's increasingly complex payment stack into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Ritesh Agarwal Has Taken PRISM Back to the IPO Gate. Investors Will Price the Quality of OYO's Profit
A FigureAsia examination of how Ritesh Agarwal is turning PRISM's renewed move towards a large Indian public offering after restructuring OYO, adding Motel 6 and improving reported profitability into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Gukesh Dommaraju Became Chess's Youngest World Champion. Defending the Crown Is a Different Business
A FigureAsia examination of how Dommaraju Gukesh is turning Gukesh's preparation to defend the world title against Javokhir Sindarov after a 2026 season in which his rating and tournament results became a public test of life under the crown into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Scott Wu Joined Devin With Windsurf. The Combined Product Must Earn a US$26 Billion Valuation
A FigureAsia examination of how Scott Wu is turning Cognition's integration of the Windsurf editor into Devin's agentic workflow and its 2026 expansion into London, Japan and Singapore into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Harshil Mathur Made Razorpay an Omnichannel Platform. Regulation Must Become a Competitive Edge
A FigureAsia examination of how Harshil Mathur is turning Razorpay's expansion from online payment gateway into a broader omnichannel, banking-software and merchant operating platform into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Sualeh Asif Took Cursor Beyond Autocomplete. The Product Must Preserve Developer Judgement
A FigureAsia examination of how Sualeh Asif is turning Cursor's expansion from assisted editing into agents that can plan, change and review work across a codebase into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Zohran Mamdani Put Affordability at the Centre of New York. Delivery Will Decide the Economics
A FigureAsia examination of how Zohran Mamdani is turning Mamdani's first year as mayor, in which an affordability mandate has moved from campaign language into bus, consumer-protection, childcare and digital-service execution into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Divya Deshmukh Won the Women's World Cup. Indian Chess Must Turn Her Result Into a Market
A FigureAsia examination of how Divya Deshmukh is turning the commercial and institutional opportunity created by Deshmukh's 2025 Women's World Cup victory, her grandmaster title and her return to the women's top ten in 2026 into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Aravind Srinivas Turned Search Into a Computer. Perplexity Must Now Make the Economics Legible
A FigureAsia examination of how Aravind Srinivas is turning Perplexity's 2026 shift from an answer engine towards Perplexity Computer, an agentic system that executes research and work rather than merely returning links into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Alexandr Wang Put Evaluation at the Centre of Meta's AI Reset. Governance Must Keep Pace
A FigureAsia examination of how Alexandr Wang is turning Meta's effort to turn the data, evaluation and operational disciplines associated with Scale AI into a repeatable development system for its new generation of models into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Surya Midha Moved From Mercor's Operations Desk to Its Chair. Governance Must Catch Up With Growth
A FigureAsia examination of how Surya Midha is turning Midha's transition from operating leadership to chairman as Mercor scales a global marketplace for experts who train and evaluate AI systems into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Adarsh Hiremath Built Mercor's Human-Data Engine. Security and Worker Quality Are Now the Product
A FigureAsia examination of how Adarsh Hiremath is turning Mercor's move from automated recruiting into high-skill human-data infrastructure for frontier AI laboratories into a test of economics, execution and durable leadership.
Asia Leaders
Feng Zhang Won $34.5 Million for Paediatric Epilepsy Editing. A Shared Platform Must Defeat Rare-Disease Economics
Feng Zhang’s ARPA-H-backed PERC consortium targets two severe childhood epilepsies first. Its real value will be whether one platform can lower the cost of treating many ultra-rare diseases.
Asia Leaders
Demis Hassabis Moved DeepMind Deeper Into the Laboratory. Scientific AI Needs a Verification Business Model
Demis Hassabis is building a wider scientific-AI stack around AlphaGenome and Co-Scientist. The opportunity is large, but laboratories need reproducible gains rather than fluent novelty.
Asia Leaders
Chuan He Connected Diet, RNA Marks and Early Immunity. Product Builders Must Separate Signal From Platform
Chuan He’s latest research brings RNA regulation into early-life immunity, learning and development. The opportunity is broad, but commercial claims must stay behind causal evidence.
Asia Leaders
Anima Anandkumar Put Neural Operators on Firmer Ground. Scientific AI Must Earn Its Compute
Anima Anandkumar’s neural-operator research targets reusable scientific models rather than one-off predictions. Adoption will depend on verification, compute economics and domain trust.
Asia Leaders
Shimon Sakaguchi Extended Treg Science Into Cancer and Heart Failure. Translation Must Now Prove Its Range
Shimon Sakaguchi’s 2026 research links Treg biology to checkpoint response and heart-failure fibrosis. Platform value will depend on reproducibility, manufacturing and patient selection.
Asia Leaders
Omar M. Yaghi Pulled Carbon From Open Air With COFs. Deployment Must Beat the Energy Bill
Omar M. Yaghi’s 2026 work pairs direct-air carbon capture with ambitious framework design. Commercialisation depends on energy use, material lifetime and repeatable manufacturing.
Asia Leaders
Susumu Kitagawa Made Porous Crystals More Selective. Industrial Separation Will Test Their Economics
Susumu Kitagawa’s 2026 MOF research advances selective carbon-dioxide and ammonia capture. Commercial value will turn on lifetime cost, process integration and industrial-scale production.
Asia Leaders
Jay Bhattacharya Is Rewriting How America Funds Medical Science. The Portfolio Test Starts Now
Jay Bhattacharya has secured room to reshape the world’s most influential biomedical funder. His challenge is to make risk-taking, replication and real-world data produce better science without turning grant selection into an opaque policy instrument.
Asia Leaders
Tan Su Shan Inherited DBS at Its Peak. Now She Has to Prove the Franchise Is Bigger Than the Rate Cycle
Tan Su Shan did not inherit a bank in need of rescue. She inherited one at its peak—and must now show that deposits, wealth, technology and regional connectivity can outlast the rate windfall.
Asia Leaders
Daphne Koller’s $800 Million AI Bet Is Reaching Its First Human Trial Test
Daphne Koller has financed insitro with roughly $800 million in capital and collaboration revenue. Its first AI-discovered MASH programme is nearing the point where patients, not models, set the valuation.
Asia Leaders
Reshma Kewalramani Is Betting Vertex’s Balance Sheet on a US$10 Billion Endocrine Expansion
Vertex’s agreement to buy Crinetics for about US$10 billion is Reshma Kewalramani’s largest strategic wager. The deal could accelerate non-cystic-fibrosis revenue, but its financing, integration and peak-sales assumptions now demand unusually close scrutiny.
Asia Leaders
Huda Zoghbi Opened a New Route to Rett Treatment. The Dose-Control Problem Will Decide Its Value
Huda Zoghbi’s latest Rett research attacks the disease’s narrow therapeutic window. Translating it will test whether precision neuroscience can deliver control, not simply a powerful one-time intervention.
Asia Leaders
Masashi Yanagisawa Is Taking Sleep Testing Out of the Lab. The Data Must Earn Clinical Trust
Masashi Yanagisawa is building a commercial bridge between sleep neuroscience, home EEG and health data. Its value depends on proving that measurement changes treatment and outcomes.
Asia Leaders
Haluk Bayraktar Is Moving KIZILELMA Into Production. A Combat-Ready Fleet Is the Test
Baykar’s KIZILELMA has progressed from rapid prototyping to a production model with an expanding weapons portfolio. Haluk Bayraktar must now build the airworthiness, maintenance and manufacturing system behind an operational fleet.
Asia Leaders
Mustafa Suleyman Is Giving Microsoft Its Own AI Model Stack. The Bill Demands More Than Strategic Independence
Mustafa Suleyman has moved Microsoft from relying primarily on a partner’s frontier models towards a broader in-house portfolio. Strategic control matters, but customers and shareholders need evidence that another model stack earns its substantial cost.
Asia Leaders
Melanie Perkins Is Taking Canva Upmarket. Enterprise Distribution Must Catch Up With Product-Led Scale
Canva grew through individual users and teams. Melanie Perkins now has to turn that bottom-up reach into governed, company-wide deployments without sacrificing the accessibility that created the platform’s advantage.
Asia Leaders
Demis Hassabis Raised $2.1 Billion to Industrialise AI Drug Design. The Clinic Has Yet to Validate the Engine
Demis Hassabis has given Isomorphic Labs the capital and computing ambition of a technology platform. The harder test is whether its drug candidates can survive the slower economics of human biology.
Asia Leaders
Feng Zhang Made Genome Editing Programmable. His New Tools Must Make It Deliverable
Feng Zhang’s laboratory has expanded the genome-editing toolbox again. The commercial test is whether smaller, safer systems can escape specialist centres and reach patients across Asia at viable cost.
Asia Leaders
Prabhakar Raghavan Is Guiding Google’s Technology After Running Search. AI Is Rewriting the Business He Helped Scale
Prabhakar Raghavan moved from leading Google’s Knowledge and Information organisation to advising the company as Chief Technologist. His technical judgement now matters as AI turns search from a list of links into an answer and action layer.
Asia Leaders
Yejin Choi Is Challenging AI’s Scale-at-All-Costs Economics. Smaller Models Must Win Beyond the Lab
Yejin Choi’s work questions the assumption that the largest model should perform every task. Her alternative—smarter algorithms, specialised systems and pluralistic design—could lower AI costs if it proves robust in real organisations and languages.
Asia Leaders
Sania Nishtar Is Rebuilding Gavi Around a US$3 Billion Funding Gap
Gavi entered its 2026–2030 strategy with more than US$9 billion pledged but roughly US$3 billion less than requested. Sania Nishtar’s answer is a leaner, country-led operating system that must protect procurement scale and accountability.
Asia Leaders
Suchi Saria Put Predictive AI Into 20 Hospitals. The Next Sale Depends on Operational Returns
Suchi Saria’s clinical AI has evidence of adoption and improved sepsis outcomes. Its 2026 test is whether those gains can be reproduced across Asian health systems with different data, workflows and economics.
Asia Leaders
Wael Sawan Put Returns Back at the Centre of Shell. Now He Has to Prove the Transition Still Fits
Wael Sawan has restored strategic clarity at Shell through cost discipline, shareholder returns and a sharper LNG focus. The harder task is building a transition business large enough to alter the group’s direction.
Asia Leaders
Fei-Fei Li’s $1 Billion Spatial-AI Bet Runs Into the Physics Problem
Fei-Fei Li has raised $1 billion to commercialise spatial intelligence. World Labs’ harder task is moving from compelling 3D output to reliable simulation.
Asia Leaders
Shinya Yamanaka Built Japan’s iPS Infrastructure. Personalised Cell Therapy Must Now Clear the Cost Barrier
Shinya Yamanaka has spent two decades turning cellular reprogramming into shared infrastructure. His next test is whether patient-specific iPS cells can be made reliably and cheaply enough for Asian health systems.
Asia Leaders
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber Is Building ADNOC for an Energy Transition That Adds Before It Subtracts
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is turning ADNOC, XRG and Masdar into a single thesis about energy security, industrial power and decarbonisation. Its credibility will be determined by capital allocation, not rhetoric.
Asia Leaders
Anima Anandkumar Joined the UN’s Science Board. AI for Science Needs Standards the World Can Afford
Anima Anandkumar’s 2026 appointment to the UN Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board puts a technical researcher inside a global governance debate. The commercial and policy test is whether AI-assisted science can be verified, reproduced and made accessible across unequal computing markets.
Asia Leaders
Georges Elhedery Has Simplified HSBC. He Must Prove the Bank Can Grow Without Rebuilding Complexity
HSBC’s restructuring has sharpened returns and accountability. Georges Elhedery’s next task is to grow wealth and transaction banking without recreating the layers he removed.
Asia Leaders
Aravind Srinivas’s Browser Ambition Depends on Winning the Enterprise Trust Search Never Required
Aravind Srinivas is pushing Perplexity from answer engine to action layer. Comet Enterprise must prove that autonomous browsing can be governed at scale.
Asia Leaders
Ardem Patapoutian Found Pressure Sensors Across the Body. Drugmakers Must Decide Where Not to Intervene
Ardem Patapoutian’s PIEZO discoveries are expanding into common diseases with large Asian markets. Commercial value will depend on tissue-specific control, not the breadth of possible indications.
Asia Leaders
Asia's Top CEOs 2016
The chief executives who set the pace of Asian business in 2016 through capital allocation, operating discipline and industry-shaping decisions.