Meet Sigla AI: The Cebu-Built, BGC-Launched Startup That Manila's Tech Scene Can't Stop Talking About

Sigla AI quietly opened its Metro Manila headquarters at One Ayala Tower in Makati last Monday, June 30, and by Thursday it had already closed a ₱480-million Series A round led by Kaya Ventures, a local fund backed in part by the Department of Trade and Industry's Startup Pilipinas program. For a company that began as a side project inside the University of San Carlos in Cebu City in 2023, the speed of that trajectory has rattled incumbent players in the Philippine health-tech market.

The timing is not accidental. Digital health adoption in the Philippines accelerated hard during the pandemic but then plateaued, leaving a fragmented ecosystem of telehealth apps that rarely talked to each other and were built mostly on Western clinical datasets that do not account for the specific disease burdens — dengue, tuberculosis, leptospirosis — that cluster in Metro Manila's most densely populated barangays. Sigla's founders spent 18 months solving exactly that problem, partnering with Philippine General Hospital on Taft Avenue to label and anonymise more than 2.3 million patient records.

What Sigla Actually Does — and Why It's Different

The platform functions as a clinical decision-support layer that sits inside existing electronic medical record systems rather than replacing them. A physician at a rural health unit in Tondo or a private clinic in Kapitolyo, Pasig, can pull up a patient file and receive real-time risk stratification in Filipino and English, flagging, for instance, a 73-percent probability of dengue haemorrhagic fever based on a constellation of symptoms that a busy resident might otherwise sequence differently. Sigla charges institutional clients ₱12,500 per facility per month on its standard tier, with a subsidised government rate of ₱4,200 negotiated under a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Health signed in May.

The model is not a large language model retrofitted from an American base. Sigla trained its core diagnostic engine on a federated learning architecture — meaning patient data never left the hospitals that contributed it — using NVIDIA H100 clusters rented through the new Aboitiz-backed data centre that came online in Santa Rosa, Laguna, in Q1 this year. That local compute infrastructure matters: latency on inference requests averages 340 milliseconds, low enough that clinicians do not experience the tool as an interruption to their workflow.

The Numbers Behind the Hype

Philippine health-tech investment hit $310 million in 2025, according to data compiled by Ideaspace Foundation, up from $187 million in 2023. Sigla is targeting a slice of that by going enterprise-first — landing contracts with 14 hospitals before its Metro Manila launch — rather than chasing the consumer telehealth market that Konsulta MD and KonsultaMD have already carved up. The ₱480-million raise values the company at roughly ₱2.1 billion, which is modest by regional standards but significant for a Philippine health-tech startup that has yet to complete its third full year of operations.

The company has committed to deploying in 50 public hospitals by December 31, 2026, a target embedded in the DTI partnership agreement. Its team of 61 full-time employees — 38 of them engineers, 11 clinicians — is hiring aggressively, posting 24 open roles on Kalibrr as of this week, mostly for ML engineers and clinical data specialists based at its BGC office on 32nd Street.

Watch three things in the months ahead. First, whether the DOH's reimbursement framework for AI-assisted diagnostics, currently under deliberation at the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation, gets finalised before year-end — that single policy decision could unlock public-sector adoption at scale. Second, Sigla's planned expansion into Visayas regional hospitals in Q4, which will test whether the Cebu roots translate into institutional trust outside Metro Manila. Third, a competing product from Singapore-based Holmusk, which has reportedly been in early discussions with Makati Medical Center. The window for Sigla to entrench itself is open, but it will not stay open indefinitely.