For decades, the venture capital world has operated on a simple, bifurcated model: founders build, and VCs invest. But in a world where AI is compressing years of innovation into days, a growing alliance of contrarians are doing their part to bring down that wall. They rally under the banner of “100X”. This February, the 100X movement is opening the floodgates for Filipinos to experience a whole new way to startup, scale and solve some of the country’s most important problems.
The 100X PH 2026 Open House will take place on Thursday, February 12, at KMC One Ayala in Makati. Far more than your typical ecosystem conference, the day offers a live immersion into a “brave new world” of startup and venture capital purpose-built for the age of AI– and for the Philippine context. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the One Ayala East Tower, current and prospective 100Xers will experience a full day in the life of a 100X founder &/or investor, pulling back the curtain on an operating system designed to “build-invest” 100X ventures that return 100X ROI commensurate with 100X impact.
This open house is hosted by 100XVC.IO, a partnership that combines the complementary strengths of Ignite House of Innovation and Kaya Founders. Their two-layer process is engineered to maximize the innovation throughput of ventures through Ignite, while enforcing the rigorous, time-tested VC methods that have defined Kaya’s portfolio of over 40 companies. Kaya Founders may potentially invest in 100X ventures coming out of the program from its current pre-seed “Zero to One” Fund.
The movement has rallied a formidable front under the National Innovators Initiative (Ni2). Foremost Philippine government agencies including the DOST, DICT, and DTI have allied with private sector organizations such as the Sinigang Valley Association, QBO-Ideaspace, and the Global AI Council Philippines to support a national grassroots push. The goal is to solve systemic “wicked” problems at a speed and scale previously unseen in the region.
The leadership driving 100X bridges the world’s elite innovation hubs with the specific, high-stakes needs of Manila. Leading the charge are Andre Yap, the Founder and CEO of Ignite House of Innovation and Chief 100X Officer of 100XVC.IO; Christina Björnström, the Co-founder of Nooroot AI and Chief AI Officer of 100XVC.IO; and Paulo Campos and Ray Alimurung, Managing Partners of Kaya Founders. They are supported by a broader umbrella of builders and AI implementers with roots in institutions like Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford.
Together, these 100X drivers argue that the traditional build-vs-invest model wastes critical time and fragments the learning cycles necessary for compounding wins. As AI drives breakthroughs in weeks and months that once took years, the 100X model represents a distinctly Filipino contribution to global innovation.
The 100X Expedition: A Conversation with Andre Yap
The Independent Investor recently had the opportunity to sit down with Andre Yap. As the venture capital landscape shifts under the weight of AI and global economic pivots, Yap is operating at the frontier of what he calls “the 100X venture.” Moving beyond the traditional Silicon Valley playbook, 100XVC is a purpose-built system and ecosystem designed to build and invest in ventures through rigorous 100-day cycles.
In this candid Q&A, Yap breaks down the “massive arbitrage” incipient in the Philippines as an entry point and testing grounds for other emerging markets”, the critical gap in scale problem solving common across emerging markets, and how a shared operating system is finally aligning founders and investors for exponential ROI and impact.
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TII: 100XVC describes itself as an “Emerging Markets North Star.” How did this initiative begin, and what is its core mission?
Andre Yap: 100X started as a VC experiment led by Ignite House of Innovation and Kaya Founders, 2 of the Philippines’ most active early-stage tech investors, with a combined portfolio of 60+ investments. Our shared quest: how can we re-build VC to bring to bear the full force of early-stage global capital onto the world’s most compelling emerging market opportunities—not as Silicon Valley has done VC, but as emerging markets need VC?
TII: Why have you chosen the Philippines as the primary testing ground for this model?
Andre Yap: In the past 3 years, we’ve focused on the Philippines mindful of its significance as our first lab and entry point for similarly-poised emerging markets. Key highlights: 118 million Filipinos, 13th biggest population and top-10 fastest rising consumer class; 50% of Filipinos below 26yo, digital-first, English speaking, with major global-facing industries in ITBPM and one of the world’s biggest diasporic workforces driving a global top-4 remittance market; yet still the Philippines ranks 79th under the OECD’s global productivity index.
TII: You mention “massive arbitrage” in your thesis. How does the current age of AI play into that opportunity?
Andre Yap: The above all signal massive arbitrage—opportunities rampant in every industry and vertical in every emerging market. Especially so in the age of AI where a perfect storm of structural inefficiencies, highly manual work flows and labor deficiencies – 3 factors endemic in many emerging markets – precisely creates a generational opening for exponential transformation and growth via agentic AI solutions.
TII: What is the “Critical Gap” you’ve identified in emerging market venture capital, and how is 100X solving for it?
Andre Yap: 100X plays on the universal first principles of VC math: because of power law (where 90% of our returns come from 10-15% of investments), we only invest in 100X opportunities; VC is not a game of risk-management so much as it is about finding the home run plays and making sure you’re in the cap table. In 100X, we’re very specific. 100X stands for 100X ROI for founders and investors, commensurate with 100X impact on customers and markets—above all a testament to 100X execution, culture and OS. It is this last point focused on high-performing founders and teams that defines 100X—because it is the holy grail so elusive in emerging markets. The emerging market VC bar is no different vs Silicon Valley’s, but supply of scale problem solvers who can do scale problem solving vastly lags the abundance of scale problems begging to be solved. This is massive emerging markets arbitrage—if you can solve the critical gap.
TII: How does the “Build-Invest” model provide an unfair advantage over the traditional, bifurcated VC approach?
Andre Yap: Enter 100XVC.IO, purpose-built so synchronous cohorts of founders and investors can methodically build-invest 100X ventures in 100-day cycles—collaboratively in lock-step with each other. Build-Investing is a deliberate innovation vs the bifurcated model where founders build separately in 3-6-12 months, then go to VCs when ready. The most critical delta of our 100XVC model is overcoming wasted time and energy by accelerating real-time and peer-to-peer feedback loops, learning, insighting, iterating and pivoting, especially in the age of AI.
TII: You’ve also mentioned a “shared operating system” for founders. What role does the Build-Invest Dashboard play in this?
Andre Yap: At the core of 100XVC is the 100X Build-Invest Dashboard that unites founders and investors in a shared operating system that combines first principles and power law to hyper-focus founders and investors on 3 emerging market keys: 1) finding and solving the most important infrastructure-level gaps; 2) obsessively delivering the most meaningful customer delta, outcomes and impact; and 3) balancing strategic agility and execution rigor with AI-first speed and efficiency—so we are always advancing the most important traction and validation variables in the next 3-6-12 months.
TII: What does “100X Execution” look like in practice as we head toward 2026?
Andre Yap: We run our build-invest cycles as annual expeditions bringing together our 100X methods with global human and financial capital and channeling them to our national grassroots footprint facilitated by the foremost national and local government agencies and private sector organizations tasked with PH innovation. For our 2025 Expedition, we ran a hand-picked cohort of 41 founders and investors– 16 weeks (so a little over our 100-day playbook) of weekly communities of practice (via Google Meets) where we heard live in-the-battlefield case studies from our 40 Fellows about where they were in our shared 100X Dashboard; how they were navigating through our yellow, green, blue zones of 100X strategy and execution; we critiqued each other and learned with and from each other, thereby channeling our learnings, iterations, pivots into real-time learnings, iterations and pivots across the board for every one of us. The delta is clear, it’s compelling– you can hear it straight from our Fellows at 100XVC.IO; scroll down to the section on LIVE NOW and click Meet the Fellows. For this new year’s Expedition 2026, our target is to invest between US$500,000 to 1,000,000 in 15 100X ventures, double our 2025 yield.
Join the Expedition
The 100X PH 2026 Open House is scheduled for Thursday, February 12, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the KMC One Ayala East Tower in Makati.
Prospective founders and investors looking to experience the 100X OS first-hand can find more information and reserve their seats directly at 100XVC.IO.
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