Leadership Report
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
Forrest Li Has Sea Growing at 47 Per Cent. The Portfolio Must Hold Together as Investment Rises
Forrest Li has returned Sea to fast growth with positive earnings. The next question is whether commerce, finance and gaming form a compounding portfolio or a costly truce.
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
Bom Kim Built Korea’s Fastest Commerce Machine. Taiwan and Farfetch Are Exposing the Cost of Expansion
Bom Kim made speed and reliability a habit in South Korean commerce. Coupang’s newer businesses are growing faster than the core, but their losses are testing the limits of the model.
Asia Leaders
Anthony Tan Is Taking Grab Beyond Southeast Asia. Taiwan Must Prove the Super-App Can Travel
Anthony Tan has made Grab profitable and faster-growing. Taiwan will test whether its mobility, delivery and financial-services operating system is portable beyond Southeast Asia.
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
Thomas Kurian Put Google Cloud on a $70 Billion Run Rate. Enterprise Agents Must Now Earn the Capacity Behind It
Thomas Kurian has made Google Cloud a credible enterprise AI platform. The economics now depend on whether agents create repeatable workloads rather than another burst of subsidised experimentation.
Asia Leaders
Budi Gunadi Sadikin Has Turned Indonesia’s Health Reform into a Procurement-and-Utilisation Test
Indonesia is pairing free health checks with one of Asia’s largest medical-equipment and digital-health programmes. Budi Gunadi Sadikin’s banker-style procurement discipline now faces the harder task of sustained treatment across 6,000 inhabited islands.
Asia Leaders
Uğur Şahin’s US$11.1 Billion Pumitamig Alliance Now Faces the Phase III Arithmetic
Pumitamig has moved from BioNTech’s US$800 million Biotheus acquisition to an alliance worth up to US$11.1 billion. Uğur Şahin must show that encouraging lung-cancer signals survive global Phase III trials and a crowded competitive field.
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
Noubar Afeyan Is Exporting Flagship’s Venture Factory to Sovereign Health Systems
Flagship Pioneering is extending its venture-creation model through Saudi, Singaporean and British institutions. Noubar Afeyan must convert privileged data and regulatory access into investable companies without compromising privacy, ownership or speed.
Asia Leaders
Shimon Sakaguchi’s Nobel Prize Has Become a Clinical Manufacturing Test
Shimon Sakaguchi’s discoveries gave immunology a new control system. RegCell’s planned US and Japanese trials will test whether that science can become a scalable autoimmune therapy rather than another elegant but expensive cell-therapy proposition.
Asia Leaders
Vasant Narasimhan Is Funding Novartis’s Next Growth Cycle with Debt, Deals and China Capacity
Vasant Narasimhan has committed Novartis to a rapid sequence of acquisitions and Chinese investment while net debt rises. The strategy could rebuild growth across RNA medicine, oncology and radioligand therapy, but execution now matters more than portfolio rhetoric.
Asia Leaders
Ong Ye Kung’s S$2.5 Billion Research Bet Must Connect to Healthier SG
Singapore is committing S$2.5 billion to translational and clinical research while expanding Healthier SG and ageing capacity. Ong Ye Kung must link discovery, primary-care incentives and measurable reductions in hospital demand.
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
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw Has Recombined Biocon. The Biosimilars Bet Must Now Generate Cash
Biocon’s structure is finally catching up with the global biosimilars business Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw assembled. Stronger margins and falling leverage are encouraging, but dilution, price competition and manufacturing execution remain material tests.
Asia Leaders
Adar Poonawalla’s Malaria Vaccine Capacity Is Running Ahead of the Funding Market
Adar Poonawalla has made Serum Institute central to the malaria vaccine market, with R21 capacity and a new Oxford licence for R78C. The commercial constraint is no longer supply alone, but financed demand and durable procurement.