Venture studio · Manila & Los Angeles

Hard-working capital for hard-working people.

masipag — Filipino: industrious, hardworking

We build and back companies where AI and nature meet, with Filipino talent, from the Philippines for the world.

Talk to Lee Read the thesis
Manila Los Angeles

The thesis

AI and nature are the defining challenges of our generation. The Philippines can lead in both.

The internet and AI let a small, skilled team build a company that serves the world. Nature is the other half of the century’s work: restoring land, paying the communities who protect it, and measuring it honestly. Few places hold both advantages the way the Philippines does.

People

A workforce built for the AI era

A young, English-speaking country whose outsourcing industry already serves the world. AI is now rewriting that work. The next step is small AI-native companies where a Filipino team owns the product, not just the hours.

Nature

One of Earth’s great living landscapes

A megadiverse country at the heart of the Coral Triangle, with forests and mangroves to restore and a carbon market being built right now. Much of the land is under Indigenous stewardship.

Bridge

Manila and Los Angeles, one team

Los Angeles has the largest Filipino community in the United States. It is where customers and diaspora founders are; Manila is where the builders are. We work from both.

1.9M

people work in Philippine IT and business-process services, earning over US$40B a year1

26.6

median age, one of the youngest workforces in Asia2

US$119M

raised by Philippine startups in all of 2025, across just 23 deals. Capital has not caught up with talent3

44%

of the country’s land lies in Indigenous ancestral domains, about 26M hectares4

4.6M

Filipino Americans, about 500,000 of them in Los Angeles, the largest Filipino metro in the US5

~49%

of the country’s land wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth6

Sources: 1 IBPAP, 2025 · 2 UN World Population Prospects 2024 · 3 Kickstart / DealStreetAsia, 2025 · 4 Philippine News Agency, 2025 · 5 Pew Research Center, 2023 · 6 Convention on Biological Diversity

What we build first

Work centres where the land is.

Put satellite internet, solar power and a room of computers in a farming town, and anyone nearby can do remote work for the world. Put that same centre next to where the harvest is processed, and the town becomes a working part of its crop’s supply chain, not just the start of it. Hard-working people, connected to the economy where they already live. These centres are what we build and grow. The first will be in Mindoro, with Stacco, for coffee.

Isometric drawing of a Masipag work centre: a satellite dish and solar panels on the resource centre, a wifi cafe in front, coffee farms and forest on one side, a processing shed with drying beds, and a truck taking product to market.1Satellite + solar2Resource centre3Wifi cafe4Farms + forest5Processing6To market
  1. Satellite internet and solarA Starlink dish and solar panels on the roof bring broadband and power without waiting for fibre or the grid.
  2. Resource centreA room of computers for remote work, training and AI-assisted services, for clients anywhere in the world.
  3. Wifi cafeThe front door. Anyone in town can come in, get online, learn, and find work through the centre.
  4. Farms and forestFarmers bring in the harvest, and record the field and forest data that buyers and carbon markets need.
  5. ProcessingCoffee is pulped and dried on site instead of sold as raw cherry. Parchment earns farmers two to three times more per kilogram.
  6. To marketThe product leaves with its records attached. The town is part of the supply chain, not just the start of it.
Connect

An office anywhere

Satellite internet such as Starlink, available in the Philippines since 2023, reaches towns that fibre will not reach for years. With power and a few computers, a rural town can take on the same remote work as the cities: customer support, data work, design and AI-assisted services.

Process

Next to the harvest

Built beside a coffee, vanilla or other crop processing site, the centre keeps more of the value where the crop is grown. The same room handles the traceability records, field data and carbon monitoring that buyers and markets now ask for.

Origin

The first one, in 2007

In Uganda, Lee helped a local NGO finish its resource centre and install two solar-powered computers. Until then its leaders travelled over three hours to Kampala to check email. From 2010 to 2013, engineering volunteers Lee placed there through Engineers Without Borders UK worked on machines to process coffee near the farm. The centre later hosted a coffee workshop for about 100 farmers and traders. The Duke years → · Coffee near the farm →

48.8%

of Philippine households had internet access in 20247

21.2%

in Zamboanga Peninsula, the least connected region. Metro Manila was 68.7%7

2–3×

more money per kilogram when farmers process coffee to parchment themselves, as a Kampala exporter told Lee in 20078

Sources: 7 PSA and DICT National ICT Household Survey, 2024 · 8 Lee’s 2007 internship letter to the J.W. Saxe Memorial Fund · Starlink: GMA News, Feb 2023

How we work

Build, back, bridge.

Build

We start companies ourselves, with founders and operators, and do the hard early work alongside them: product, first customers, first hires.

Back

We back founders early when their work fits the thesis, and stay useful after the cheque: introductions, recruiting and a team in Manila.

Bridge

We connect Filipino talent with global markets, and the diaspora with the companies being built at home.

Build talent · Manila, 7 Nov 2026

Code Academy

We sponsor Code Academy by Wovoka.dev, a one-day AI bootcamp and hackathon in Makati. Students, developers and online sellers spend a Saturday with the Wovoka Studio team, learn to build with Claude, and leave with something they made. Sponsorship keeps student seats at ₱1,500.

See the day →

Portfolio

What we are building.

Companies

Climate technology

Wovoka

Software for nature and the communities who protect it: field data, carbon intelligence and payments to the people doing the work.

wovoka.io →
Carbon market intelligence

Carbon.Supply

Reads the carbon registries every day and turns them into regional editions for developers, buyers and investors, before credits issue.

carbon.supply →
Community app

Ghost Dance

A phone app that pays community members for verified field observations on their own land, so stewardship becomes paid work.

Live with field teams
AI services · United States

HELOC.VIP

A US consumer finance service run by an AI voice agent and a small team, proving the model: built from the Philippines, sold in America.

Operating
Uganda · Vanilla

Buji Vanilla

Started in a California garage with a Ugandan grower family. Now sold at Four Seasons, sourced from a farmer cooperative.

bujivanilla.com →

Nature projects in development

Philippines · Reforestation

Mindoro Arawatan

One of two biodiversity corridors in the Philippines, with twelve partner communities. Selected by ADB.

In diligence
Philippines · Reforestation

Bukidnon Kaamulan

On the largest Indigenous land title in the Philippines, structured as a community cooperative.

Feasibility
Uganda · Agroforestry

Buji Coffee

Washed Robusta from a community-owned processing centre in Buikwe. The Buji Vanilla model, applied to coffee.

Scoping

Angel portfolio

Early-stage · Via the AngelList platform

Backing founders in climate and AI

Alongside the companies we build, Lee has exposure to more than a dozen early-stage companies through funds on the AngelList platform, mostly in climate: clean energy and storage, AI for farms and nature, climate risk and climate finance.

Field notes

Companies we are watching.

Short memos on companies working where AI meets the natural world, and on what we like about each one.

Amsterdam · AI for the grid

Overstory

Overstory reads satellite imagery to show power utilities which trees threaten their lines, so crews can cut wildfire and outage risk before it happens.

What we like

Its buyers are regulated utilities with a budget line they cannot skip. Six of the ten largest utilities in the Americas use it, and a $43M Series B in late 2025 brought in Bentley Systems, a strategic investor in infrastructure software. Typhoon-exposed grids in Southeast Asia are an obvious next market.

What to watch

Long utility sales cycles, and direct competitors chasing the same customers.

Sources: Overstory, Nov 2025

Earth observation · Foundation models

LGND

LGND builds “large Earth models” that turn satellite imagery into compact data AI systems can search, so you can ask questions of the planet without building a new model each time.

What we like

It is a tooling layer for everyone else in nature tech, including the measurement work carbon and land projects in the Philippines need. It won the Snowflake Startup Challenge in 2026, and John Hanke, who started the company behind Google Earth, backed its seed round.

What to watch

It is early, with no disclosed revenue, and the largest mapping and cloud companies are building similar models.

Sources: TechCrunch, Jul 2025 · Snowflake, Jun 2026

Energy for AI · United States

Exowatt

Exowatt makes modular units that capture solar heat, store it, and turn it into round-the-clock power for data centres.

What we like

Power is now the bottleneck for AI, and a modular unit can be deployed faster than a grid upgrade. The company raised about $140M in under two years and reports a large backlog of demand from data-centre developers.

What to watch

The technology is not yet proven at scale, the backlog is self-reported, and it competes with batteries and gas.

Sources: Exowatt, Nov 2025 · Business Wire, Mar 2026

Philippines · Payments

GCash

GCash is the Philippines’ largest mobile wallet. Its parent, Mynt, is backed by Globe, Ayala, Ant International and MUFG and is preparing to list on the Philippine Stock Exchange.

What we like

It already reaches rural households in a country where most people still use cash. That makes it the natural way to pay farmers and community stewards for verified work on their land, which is the model Wovoka is building toward. A listing of this size is also a sign that local capital markets are growing up.

What to watch

Credit risk in its lending business, regulation, competition from Maya, and thin trading on the local exchange.

Sources: GMA, Aug 2026 · The Star, Sep 2026

Climate software

Wovoka

Wovoka builds software for nature and the communities who protect it: field data from people on their own land, daily carbon market intelligence, and payments to the people doing the work.

What we like

Nature finance keeps failing at the same point: proving what happened on the ground, and getting money to the people who made it happen. Wovoka works on both ends, with a field app already in use and a team in the Philippines building it.

What to watch

Carbon markets are volatile and slow to pay, so the company has to earn revenue from data and software, not only from credits.

Sources: wovoka.io · carbon.supply

Field notes are our own views, written from public sources, and may be out of date. They are not investment advice, and they are not an offer or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. People involved with Masipag may have exposure, through funds on the AngelList platform, to some of the companies discussed. Lee Pearson founded Wovoka.

Track record

We have built companies before.

Masipag is led by Lee Pearson, who has spent his career starting new ventures inside large companies and on his own.

  • San Francisco & Los Angeles · 2015–2020

    BCG and BCG Digital Ventures

    Rose from Consultant to Principal at Boston Consulting Group, then joined the founding team of BCG Digital Ventures’ energy practice. Partnered with a global midstream gas company on a small-scale LNG venture that led to an $80M+ investment in a new business unit.

  • Malaysia

    Launching Setel

    As BCG’s business lead on the build, managed the team in a 14-week sprint with Petronas, Malaysia’s national energy company. The sprint put Setel, a mobile app for paying for fuel and more, into the market in Malaysia, where more than nine million people now use it.

  • Now

    Wovoka

    Building technology for nature and the communities who protect it, with a team in the Philippines.

Ignitius Bwoogi arrived in California on asylum from Uganda. Together we built a vanilla business in a garage. It is now sold at Four Seasons, and his brother runs the farmer cooperative.

That is the model: a hard-working founder, a real product and patient support.

Get in touch

Building, backing or joining?

If you are a founder, an operator, or someone who wants to help build this, we would like to hear from you.

Email Lee

Or get occasional updates from Masipag.

Thank you. We’ll be in touch.