Asia’s founders are decamping to the U.S. as the region suffers a protracted venture funding slump

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).

Asia’s, and particularly Southeast Asia’s, venture capital space is in a protracted slump. Venture funding to Southeast Asian tech firms fell........

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