On Our Radar is our way of sharing ideas we’d like to see founders tackle. If one of these excites you, take it as validation to dive in. You don’t need to be working on one of these to apply. We’ll be posting more of these soon.
The last two decades of consumer tech optimized for engagement, attention capture, and extraction. The playbook of free product, monetize attention, mine the data and sell prediction, and to dark-pattern the retention is wildly profitable and corrosive to society. Asia inherited it with their super-apps, infinite feeds, lending traps, but without the guardrails.
AI is a fork in the road. The same technology that could hyper-personalize manipulation could also make user-aligned business models economically competitive for the first time. We want to fund the second branch.
We’re looking for founders who can build a durable business whose incentives point the same direction as the user’s. This isn’t charity, and it isn’t ethics as a marketing skin. We want a structurally non-predatory model that wins because it’s aligned, not despite it.
Post-extractive consumer
Social media, mobile gaming, and consumer fintech in Asia are dominated by attention-extraction and engagement-maximization. The user is the product, the metric is time-on-app, and the dark patterns are load-bearing. It works, and it costs the people using it attention, mental health, predatory micro-lending, gacha spend.
AI makes a different model viable for the first time. When an agent can do real work for a user (planning, filtering, negotiating, protecting) you can charge them directly for outcomes instead of renting their attention to advertisers. The willingness to pay that never existed for “a better feed” may exist for “an agent that gives me my time back.”
We want to fund things like:
Attention-return products: media, social, or information tools whose core metric is time saved or well spent, not time captured for its own sake. Monetized by subscription or outcome (or some new model), not ads or engagement.
Non-predatory consumer finance: lending, BNPL, and wealth tools for Asia’s mass-affluent and underbanked that make money when the user’s financial position improves, not when they revolve debt. AI underwriting makes small-balance, aligned lending economically possible for the first time.
User-side agents: software that represents the user’s interests against the extractive stack: negotiating bills, canceling subscriptions built to be uncancelable, filtering out manipulation. The agent works for the human, not the platform.
The business model matters more than the technology here. Show us why yours doesn’t revert to extraction the moment growth pressure hits.
The winning company here proves that aligned can beat addictive on a P&L.
- Kevin Lin, Partner at 886 Studios & ikigai Launchpad & Co-founder of Twitch
The next round of acceptances for ikigai Launchpad closes on September 4th.
We’re hosting an AMA with the ikigai mentors next Tuesday (9/1 @10:30 AM CST). Sign up here to join and come with any questions you might have about the program, the journey of building a venture-backed startup, and more.
Apply to ikigai Launchpad here.
To learn more, visit our website.
