Now onboarding anchor clients · Singapore & Vietnam

Investment-grade due diligence, built for how fraud actually works in Southeast Asia.

We map the ownership and transaction relationships between entities — surfacing circular shareholding, nominee layering, and fabricated revenue that automated screening misses. Verification in 5–10 days, from USD 1,500.

Request diligence See pricing
View sample reports — three real cases from the public record →
5–10
days / engagement
$1.5K
starting price
5
SEA markets
Ownership graph · live view ● Circular structure detected
HOLDCO SG NOMINEE A NOMINEE B SHELL VN
Declared ownership Undisclosed circular control
Engaged with Fintech Association of Singapore MAS FSTI / Fintech Innovation Lab AI Singapore co-innovation Enterprise Singapore GIA
The structural blind spot

Southeast Asia's investors keep passing every check — right up until the collapse.

Ownership data across the region is fragmented, multilingual, and walled off by data-localisation laws in Vietnam and Indonesia. Manual Big Four diligence costs USD 50K–500K and takes 4–8 weeks. Automated tools are cheap — and structurally blind to how fraud is actually built here.

eFishery raised over a billion dollars and passed every automated check available to its investors.

The fraud — fabricated revenues routed through connected entities — only surfaces when you trace the relationships between entities, not each one in isolation. That is precisely the gap GroundState is built to close.

Source: Bloomberg, Jan 2025
$1.4B
Valuation erased in the eFishery fraud — ~79% of reported 2024 revenue was fabricated. Every automated compliance check passed.
4–8 wks
Big Four diligence timeline
$500K
Top-end Big Four DD cost
5
SEA jurisdictions with data-localisation laws
Cases in the public record

Three of the region's largest frauds share one signature: relationships.

Each of these was adjudicated in court and documented in the public record. Each defeated conventional, entity-by-entity screening. And each left the same structural fingerprint — control and cash moving through connected parties.

These are retrospective illustrations built entirely from public reporting and court records. GroundState did not conduct diligence on these companies; we use them to show the patterns our platform is designed to surface.

Indonesia 9-yr sentence · 2026
eFishery
Aquaculture tech · founded 2013
~79%
of reported 2024 revenue was fabricated — USD 752M claimed vs. USD 157M actual.

Pattern: dual books and revenue routed through ~15 related entities; 400K+ feeders claimed against ~24K real. A relational lens flags the related-party revenue concentration and the asset-count mismatch.

Sources: Bloomberg, CNBC
Vietnam Death sentence · 2024
Vạn Thịnh Phát / SCB
Real estate & banking · 2012–2022
$27B
in total damages — the largest fraud in Vietnamese history, run through a shell-company network.

Pattern: ~90% control of a bank held through proxy shareholders, funding thousands of loans to shell borrowers that cycled cash back to the group. This is nominee layering and circular lending — a textbook graph signature.

Sources: CBS News, Fortune
DE · Singapore ops Insolvent · 2020
Wirecard
Payments · Asia HQ Singapore
€1.9B
in "escrow" cash that never existed — routed through fictitious third-party acquirers in Asia.

Pattern: round-tripping through third-party processors made internal cash look like customer revenue; escrow accounts were fabricated. Tracing counterparties and cash direction exposes the loop.

Sources: Financial Times, Fortune
Read the full sample reports
The platform

AI precision. Human judgment. One integrated verification.

GroundState is a Due Diligence-as-a-Service platform built specifically for Southeast Asia — combining proprietary relational analysis with experienced, on-the-ground regional analysts.

Graph-based fraud detection

We fuse ownership and transaction graphs to detect circular shareholding, nominee layering, and synthetic revenue flows that text-based tools miss entirely.

Data-localisation compliant

A federated architecture trains on jurisdiction-partitioned data — raw records never leave their country, keeping us compliant with Vietnam's and Indonesia's data laws.

Regional legal intelligence

Our models read ownership and control from Southeast Asian legal and registry documents across five jurisdictions and multiple languages — where generic AI fails.

Auditable ownership timelines

When registries disagree — as they routinely do — we reconcile conflicting records into a single, confidence-scored ownership timeline with a clear source trail.

How an engagement works

From scoping call to signed report in 5–10 days.

A single, structured process — no black boxes. You see the method and the evidence behind every finding.

1

Scope

We define the target, jurisdiction, and risk questions with you.

≤ 24 hours
2

Ingest

Registry filings, media, and financials pulled across five markets.

Day 1–2
3

Map

We build the ownership and transaction graph and run fraud-pattern analysis.

Day 2–5
4

Verify

Analysts corroborate flags on the ground — site visits, interviews, documents.

Day 4–8
5

Report

A confidence-scored, evidence-linked verification you can act on.

Day 8–10
Services & pricing

The right depth for every investment decision.

From rapid AI-assisted pre-screening to full forensic engagement — at a fraction of Big Four cost.

Tier 1
Essential
$1,500 – $3,000 / engagement
48–72 hours
AI-automated screening with a brief analyst review. Built for seed-stage VC triage and MSME loan pre-screening.
  • Registry checks across 5 jurisdictions
  • Adverse media screening
  • Basic ownership mapping
  • AI fraud-risk score
Most popular
Professional
$5,000 – $12,000 / engagement
5–7 days
Adds management interviews, reference calls, and on-the-ground spot checks. Core offering for Series A and private credit.
  • Everything in Essential
  • Management interviews
  • Reference calls
  • On-the-ground spot checks
  • Full relational fraud analysis
Tier 3
Enterprise
$15,000 – $30,000 / engagement
10–15 days
Full engagement — extended in-country presence, forensic document review, network mapping, and covenant baseline.
  • Everything in Professional
  • Extended in-country presence
  • Forensic document review
  • Full network mapping
  • Formal covenant baseline
Recurring
Monitoring
$2,000 – $4,000 / quarter
Self-renewing quarterly
Recurring post-deal covenant monitoring — AI-assisted financial analysis, field analyst visit, written report.
  • AI-assisted financial analysis
  • Quarterly field analyst visit
  • Covenant compliance report
  • Continuous fraud-signal monitoring

First two engagements available at 30% discount for anchor clients. Contact us to discuss →

Technology

Built for the challenges standard tools can't solve.

Four original technical components addressing structural failures unique to Southeast Asian due diligence.

Capability 01

Relational fraud detection

Uncovers patterns invisible to conventional screening — circular ownership, disguised beneficial control, and fabricated revenue engineered through connected entities. Where standard checks examine companies in isolation, we analyse the web of relationships between them.

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network
Capability 02

Privacy-compliant cross-border intelligence

Operates in full compliance with the data-localisation laws of Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines — without sacrificing regional intelligence. Sensitive records never cross borders, yet the platform keeps learning fraud patterns across the region.

Federated GNN
Capability 03

Southeast Asian legal document intelligence

Reads and extracts ownership, control, and entity information from regional legal and regulatory documents — across five jurisdictions and multiple languages. Generic AI fails here because it was never built for the region's regulatory vocabulary. GroundState was.

Domain-adapted legal LLM
Capability 04

Authoritative ownership-timeline reconstruction

Produces a single, confidence-scored ownership timeline even when government registries disagree. When a tax authority and a business registry record conflicting dates, we surface the most probable truth alongside an auditable record of exactly what each source shows.

Bayesian-HMM reconciliation
Where we sit

A category that doesn't yet exist.

Southeast Asia's investors face two inadequate options: Big Four diligence that costs too much and takes too long, or automated tools structurally blind to how fraud actually works here. GroundState replaces both.

Provider Structural limitation GroundState advantage
Big Four firms USD 50K–500K per engagement; 4–8 weeks; no AI efficiency; no systematic learning AI + boots-on-ground hybrid at USD 1,500–30,000; 5–10 days; every engagement improves the model
AI background checkers No physical verification; rules-based; fail on SEA relational fraud patterns Graph analysis detects circular ownership, nominee layering, and circular invoicing — invisible to text-only tools
Centralised data platforms
(Refinitiv, LexisNexis)		 Depend on centralised aggregation — legally impermissible in Vietnam and Indonesia Federated architecture enables cross-border learning without raw data leaving any jurisdiction
Coverage

Regionally grounded — not observed from the outside.

Live in Singapore and Vietnam today, expanding across ASEAN's highest-fraud-risk, hardest-to-verify markets.

🇸🇬
Singapore
Active
🇻🇳
Vietnam
Active
🇲🇾
Malaysia
Year 2
🇵🇭
Philippines
Year 2
🇮🇩
Indonesia
Year 3
About

Built by someone who lived through the problem.

GroundState is a Singapore-based, AI-powered due diligence platform for Southeast Asian capital markets, private credit, and MSME lending — a product of Gukom Pte. Ltd., Singapore.

Singapore-incorporated & IP-domiciled

All core IP — model weights, training pipelines, and fraud-pattern datasets — is developed, owned, and domiciled in Singapore.

Member, Fintech Association of Singapore

Engaging with AI Singapore co-innovation programmes, the MAS Fintech Innovation Lab (FSTI), and Enterprise Singapore's Global Innovation Alliance.

Kok Chuan Lim, Founder and CEO of GroundState
Kok Chuan Lim
Founder & CEO

Over 20 years across global investment banks and Southeast Asian fintech — FX/rates sales at DBS, BNP Paribas, and Barclays Capital; debt capital markets at Deutsche Bank (second-highest global individual contributor, 2007/2008), Nomura, and Goldman Sachs (Executive Director, SEA institutional clients).

Co-founded Investree — Indonesia's largest SME productive-loan originator — backed by SBI Holdings, MUFG Innovation Partners, and BRI Ventures. Investree was later a direct victim of undetected borrower misconduct: the empirical foundation of GroundState's problem definition.

BBA Financial Analysis, NTU CFA Specialist Dip. AI, Temasek Poly FAS Member
Get in touch

Ready to verify your next investment?

We're onboarding anchor clients in Singapore and Vietnam at a 30% introductory discount. Tell us about your target and we'll scope the right engagement.

Headquarters

Singapore — GroundState by Gukom Pte. Ltd.

Coverage

Singapore · Vietnam · Malaysia · Philippines · Indonesia

Response time

We scope every engagement within 24 hours

Request diligence

Tell us about your investment and we'll scope the right engagement within 24 hours.