This deep dive expands on the Loop Asia conversation with Chris Birrell, Managing Partner at Func Ventures.

Chris Birrell mentions his SUPERIOR framework almost in passing — eight attributes, developed over about a year, distilled from a career running from writing C++ against the raw Windows API to sitting as CIO on enterprise budgets. Underneath the acronym is a compressed argument about what makes an API business durable.

S — Solving a difficult problem

Birrell says this letter matters most — everything else is a modifier on it. The problem has to be difficult, solved narrowly and deeply, priced right, sticky, easy to adopt. His example is Stripe: people underrate it as "just a payment gateway." What makes it defensible is that it solves the problem across every currency and geography, absorbing the pain — onboarding, treasury, banking relationships — a merchant would otherwise carry itself. Depth, not feature count, is the moat.

U — Uncovering unique and novel solutions

Birrell treats usage patterns as a leading indicator, not a lagging one. His example is Stripe and Twilio in Uber's early days: Uber only existed because it could assemble a globally scalable product on infrastructure it didn't have to build. Not Stripe or Twilio predicting Uber's success — Uber's rise revealing what their APIs were worth. Watching who adopts an API, and why, signals an opportunity's size before market data catches up.

P — Pathways to profitability and exit

Birrell is blunt here: "you've got to be able to build something that's compelling enough that people will actually pay for it." He's drawing a line against a "beautiful API that works nicely and everyone loves it" with no commercial engine behind it — the failure mode developer-tools startups fall into chasing adoption metrics that never convert into willingness to pay.

E — Ecosystem

This is where Birrell's macro thesis folds back in: three ecosystems he expects to define the next decade — AI, blockchain, IoT. His claim isn't that any one is investable alone, but that all three will need API layers, and a startup's position relative to them — infrastructure for an agent, a smart contract, a device — signals durability.

R — Regional

Here Birrell inverts the usual VC instinct: the standard playbook — find a model that worked in the US, transplant it to Southeast Asia with local tweaks — treats regional specificity as friction to minimise. Birrell looks for the opposite: startups where solving a regional problem well is the product. His example is Asia Verify, a Singapore company he's invested in that has scanned over 100 million company documents across 14 Asian jurisdictions, making onboarding and beneficial-ownership verification legible across languages and regulatory regimes that don't normally talk to each other. The complexity isn't overhead — it's the value proposition, hard for a generic global competitor to replicate cheaply.

I — Impact

Birrell doesn't elaborate much here, beyond noting it matters to many investors — but its place alongside seven hard-nosed commercial criteria is notable. Impact isn't a marketing layer bolted on afterward; it sits in the same evaluation matrix as pathways to exit.

O — Ownership

Patents and copyright — straightforward, but worth reading alongside "S" above. A company that's solved a genuinely difficult problem still needs legal protection against a well-funded competitor copying it once the market's proven. Ownership is the backstop for depth.

R — Regulatory tailwinds

Birrell's example is KYC — know-your-customer verification — riding a wave of tightening bank and exchange regulation. This criterion is explicitly time-bound: a tailwind is a window, not a permanent moat. The startups riding it hardest — Birrell name-checks Frankie One, the Melbourne-based KYC fintech that started with Australian banks and Afterpay before going global — are betting the compliance burden compounds faster than incumbents can build in-house alternatives.

What the framework is actually for

As a checklist, SUPERIOR reads like standard VC diligence with API-specific vocabulary. As a whole, it's a bet on where enterprise software is heading — hard-to-build infrastructure, embedded deep enough to be sticky, sitting at the intersection of AI, blockchain, IoT, and tightening regulation. Impact and Ownership, the letters with least airtime, do the quiet risk-management work behind the other six's bigger bets.