Monday.com eyes ASEAN growth with Singapore hub

Work management software specialist Monday.com has opened its Southeast Asia headquarters in Singapore as it looks to expand its footprint in one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for cloud-based applications.

The new office at Collier Quay will serve as the company’s hub for the region, housing go-to-market teams, including sales, marketing and partner managers to support a burgeoning customer base.

Previously, the Israeli-headquartered firm serviced the region from its Sydney office. The move to establish a presence in Singapore is driven by the need to be closer to clients and build deeper relationships in the market.

“We’ve been fortunate that we’ve had some strong partners in the region that have enabled us to grow, but we’re now at a stage where we have some very significant customers across the region,” said Dean Swan, Asia-Pacific (APAC) general manager at Monday. “There’s an expectation from our customers that we need to have people here on the ground, build trust and relationships, and see people eye to eye.”

The company, which has over 250,000 customers globally, is seeing strong demand in Southeast Asia from organisations of all sizes looking to digitise their operations and move away from traditional tools like spreadsheets and email. Its regional customers include Unilever, Brother International and tech firm Cloudmile.

“Organisations need to be able to adapt really quickly. And that has really fuelled the demand for Monday on the work management side of things,” Swan said.

While the company is known for its core work management platform, its expansion into new product areas like customer relationship management (Monday CRM) and IT service management (Monday Service) is also gaining traction in the region.

Swan revealed that the company’s largest global deal for Monday Service this year came from a customer in Southeast Asia. He attributed the customer win to the platform’s flexibility and artificial intelligence (AI)-first design, which he believes gives Monday an edge over other suppliers such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.

“With traditional software, you design the database schema, and then you build a user interface [UI] on top of that, but it’s inherently quite rigid by design,” he said. “Whereas Monday works backwards from the UI and uses a schema-less database so that end-users, not just technical people, can design dynamic software that’s super flexible. 

“That means if an end-user wants to change a field in the system or rename something, they can just do it themselves. They don’t have to go into a ticket queue and wait weeks to hardcode something,” Swan explained. That said, for larger and more complex enterprise deployments, partners will be roped in to help customers analyse business processes and provide ongoing support, he added.

Monday is also targeting software developers with its Monday Dev product, which Swan claimed can bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams, such as marketing and user experience, in product development while supporting both agile and waterfall methodologies.

“We want to enable these teams to work together in a seamless way and provide that transparency and visibility into their development process for building and taking products to market,” Swan said.

Monday’s design philosophy is also key to its AI strategy that takes the platform from managing work to actively executing it. For example, the firm is embedding AI capabilities, like the Monday Sidekick AI assistant to automate tasks and an AI agent builder that lets users create their own specialised digital assistants in a no-code environment.

“A lot of traditional software companies are bolting AI onto their products, while the current crop of contemporary software has been built with AI front and centre,” Swan said. “That’s also our competitive advantage.”

Addressing the industry-wide question of how to price AI capabilities, Swan said Monday uses a consumption-based AI credit system for “AI blocks” that customers can use to build AI-powered workflows. For newer capabilities, such as the AI agent builder, he said the company is still working through the pricing models.

The goal, he added, is to ensure the pricing models reflect the value delivered to customers. “This is the challenge we see in the world of AI at the moment – there’s a lot of investment, but the impact isn’t quite matching up,” he said. “So, how do we take something to market that sort of has value for the investment?”

Currently, Monday leverages its global partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud infrastructure, with its primary APAC cloud region located in Sydney. Swan said the company is considering a Singapore cloud region in the future to meet customer demands around data sovereignty.