The Invest ASEAN website and AI investor mapping tool.

Invest ASEAN is the region’s platform for presenting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to investors worldwide.

The existing site no longer reflected ASEAN’s investment priorities, or the standards of accessibility, security and usability that investors now expect. To stay competitive, the platform needed a full modernisation.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) saw the chance to go further: pair a modernised website with AI-powered investor mapping, connecting funds, investors and governments with the right opportunities.

Deliver a modernised Invest ASEAN website and an AI investor mapping tool, then hand both to the people who run and use them: the ASEAN Secretariat, ESCAP and ASEAN’s investment promotion agencies (IPAs).

End-to-end delivery: a single structured programme took the platform through design, build, testing and handover, with project management keeping every partner aligned.

The work started with a workplan and technical roadmap that set out 17 outputs, from design and build to training, documentation and post-launch advisory.

Consultations with the ASEAN Secretariat and ESCAP shaped the site’s structure and design skeleton. ddx presented two design directions, and a modular, action-oriented design was agreed.

The site was built on WordPress, on ASEAN’s own hosting, so non-technical staff can keep content up to date.

The AI tool sits behind a role-based login for registered users, using vector embeddings to match search queries semantically against external data sets that sync automatically on a defined schedule. Each search returns matching relevant investment projects and a ranked shortlist of investor profiles, drawn from a leading project data platform and a professional contact database.

Before launch, the platform was tested for security, accessibility, and usability. The ASEAN Secretariat, ESCAP, and ASEAN ITSD then received a full technical handover, with maintenance documentation, a troubleshooting guide and an AI tool user manual.

The new Invest ASEAN website officially went live at investasean.asean.org, with an integrated AI investor mapping tool for registered users covering three sectors: Solar, Biofuels and Smart grid.

Following the completed build, the hands-on training for the UN team was conducted in Jakarta.

ESCAP has since contracted ddx directly to extend the platform. That’s the clearest measure of how this first phase landed.

Complex partnerships: one platform, several owners, and how to turn a multi-stakeholder project into an on-scope delivery.

The website designs went through several review rounds. To balance input from multiple stakeholders, a collaborative review using side-by-side options and plainly stated trade-offs brought the teams back to the same table, and one design was agreed.

On the infrastructure side, deployment depended on distributed hosting, strict third-party security firewalls, and multi-party infrastructure approvals across ESCAP, the ASEAN Secretariat, ASEAN ITSD, the hosting provider and ddx. Steady follow-ups and a plan that kept the build moving while procurement ran in parallel meant the site was delivered on full scope.