Yoevan Khemlani had already begun building his AI company in Singapore when he realized that all his customers were looking somewhere else.
Khemlani had started Interfaze, a startup offering a specialized AI model for backend tasks like web scraping, with a team of four in 2025. “As we were training the model, a lot of our customers who were exploring or trying the product were moving to the U.S., already based in the U.S. or selling to the U.S.,” Khemlani tells Fortune.
And so Khemlani moved to the San Francisco Bay Area last May, drawn by the U.S.’s huge customer base. “We saw the market was there and decided to move,” he says.
Asia once drew tech founders with its underpenetrated markets, lower costs, and rising wealth. Several cities, like Singapore, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, tried to position themselves as up-and-coming tech hubs, potentially challenging San Francisco’s longtime dominance in tech.
But founders are now taking a second look at the U.S., both pulled by its massive market and easy access to capital, and pushed by regulatory scrutiny and fragmented markets in Asia.
Since 2025, global venture capital firm Antler has helped more than 30 Asian founding teams relocate to the U.S.
“Most of the founders we see in Asia these days want to build global businesses, and the attraction of being in the U.S. is unmistakable for that purpose,” Jussi Salovaara, Antler’s co-founder and managing partner of Asia, told Fortune. “Customers, talent and capital are all found in abundance there.”
The U.S. attracted roughly 68% of all startup funding last year, according to KPMG. Asia only attracted 12% over the same period. The difference is even starker in the first quarter of 2026, with the U.S. winning 80% of all startup funding, due to massive fundraising rounds for developers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Asia’s share dropped to 9.6% (even if funds were stable in absolute terms).
Push and pull
Asia’s, and particularly Southeast Asia’s, venture capital space is in a protracted slump. Venture funding to Southeast Asian tech firms fell by almost 80% between 2022 and 2024, from approximately $10.1 billion to $2.2 billion. The region currently accounts for roughly 0.5% to 2% of global VC investment; most APAC investment is concentrated in India and China.
The region also hasn’t offered lucrative exit opportunities for investors. “There’s been some large IPOs in Southeast Asia, but not as many as the ecosystem needed,” explains Salovaara. “That’s definitely impacting investor confidence.”
Southeast Asian IPOs raised $6.5 billion last year, a 76% jump, according to Deloitte. That’s still a sliver compared to IPO proceeds in the Chinese city of Hong Kong, at $37 billion.
Several Southeast Asian companies are trading below their offer price. JustCo, a Singaporean flexible work company, is already trading below the IPO price just weeks after its June debut. Foundation Healthcare, the first healthcare business to list on the Singapore Exchange in four years, also closed 7.9% below IPO price on its first day of trading on July 8.
In addition, Southeast Asia is actually a collection of several very different markets, meaning firms can’t rely on a single blueprint for the region. “When you invest in the U.S., you’re investing in the whole country, which is a huge market,” says Khemlani. “But when you invest in Southeast Asia, you have to pick which country you want to invest in. The go-to-market strategy in each Southeast Asian nation is very different.”
And though more capital is flowing into China and India, companies there still face less patient private capital, stricter listing requirements and lower valuation multiples than their U.S. counterparts.
For IndustrialMind.AI founder Justin Li, unfavorable market conditions back home was a push factor to move to the U.S. “B2B start-ups don’t have the best market access in China, as we’re mostly able to serve only Chinese customers and the local market.”
Li, an ex-Tesla engineer, built an AI engineer that can monitor production lines to detect anomalies and suggest fixes. Most of his customers are auto manufacturers from the U.S. and Europe.
Geopolitics might also be playing a role. Western firms may be uncomfortable with working with a firm based in China, particularly regarding business models that rely on sharing data. Even if executives are comfortable working with a Chinese startup, they’d need to navigate an increasingly complex web of restrictions and politics in both the U.S. and China, particularly as AI begins to be seen more as a strategic technology than just a product.
Others tout Silicon Valley’s vibrant founder community. “These whisper networks aren’t anywhere else,” Sanjil Jain, an Indian founder who relocated to the U.S. in April to build Drift, an AI-powered platform for robotics engineering, says. “You get to meet people, gain access to new technologies, and integrate them into your solution so you can offer something new.”
Jain has hired three Americans to join his team of five since the move. “If we were to look for the same talent in India, it would have taken us a lot of time to sieve out the exact profile or the craziness in a person who would want to build with us,” he says.
“But here, pretty much everyone is crazy about building new technologies.”
When does Asia make sense?
Despite Silicon Valley’s allure, Salovaara stresses that a U.S. relocation isn’t straightforward.
Last September, Trump raised H-1B visa fees from $5,000 to $100,000, sending shockwaves through corporate America. “Being Indian citizens, it’s not easy for us to get visas—we’re looking at year-long waits,” Jain tells Fortune. (Last month, a U.S. federal court blocked the administration’s highly controversial visa fee hike, ruling it an unauthorized tax.)
“What’s also challenging is achieving proper U.S. growth,” Salovaara adds. “Founders need to make some cultural transitions: In Asia, investors are very focused on revenue growth and profitability relatively early, while in the U.S., they pay more attention to your vision and the problem you’re looking to solve.”
He also suggests that some businesses are better suited to Southeast Asian markets, which tend to offer more investment opportunities around infrastructure and energy. He points to one Antler-backed example: Alternō, a Singapore-incorporated Vietnamese startup that has developed low-cost renewable energy storage using sand-based thermal batteries.
“If you’re building in Vietnam, it’s obviously going to be a lot more cost-effective compared to the U.S,” Salovaara says.
Antler’s guiding philosophy is that it should be possible for founders to build successful startups from anywhere in the world. “People can innovate from almost anywhere, and at a level they weren’t able to before,” CEO Magnus Grimeland told Fortune earlier this year. (Antler only opened its first office in Silicon Valley in 2025, eight years after its founding).
Salovaara is hopeful that more Asian founders will opt to build within the region. “In time, capital will become more evenly distributed between the different markets,” he concludes. “As ecosystems mature, they’ll also capture more talent and capital, so I hope we’ll begin to see more founders building from Asia for the world.” (On June 26, Antler announced it would be expanding its focus on China-outbound founders, and adding Japanese and South Korean founders into the mix.)
In the short term, however, Asian hubs still have a long way to go before they can compete with Silicon Valley.
“You can build from anywhere today, be it Singapore or the UK, but from a sales standpoint, it’s difficult to reach a global customer base from those countries,” Khemlani says. “From a venture perspective, it’s also very hard to raise capital in San Francisco if you’re still in Singapore.”
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