Asia’s founders are going global faster, sometimes even before they’re sure what their business is, says Stripe’s SEA MD

With the rise of AI, Asian tech founders are now thinking about global markets even when they’re still conceptualizing their business .

Singapore-based AI firms now enter an average of seven new markets just one year after inception, according to a Stripe survey.

“We’re seeing a significant shift in how Asia-based firms are looking at cross-border business,” Sarita Singh, Stripe’s regional head and MD of Southeast Asia, Greater China and South Korea, tells Fortune .

“There’s been a big push to find customers and grow outside of the home country.” This marks a departure from the earlier playbook of most Asian firms, which Singh refers to as a “thoughtful but slower approach” to international expansion.

“Businesses would first build for a local market,” she explains.

“They would then iterate the product and methodically expand country-by-country, building local banking relationships as they go.” AI-native firms also are scaling and monetizing more quickly than their SaaS peers.

A 2025 study found that the top 100 AI companies on Stripe took a median of 11.5 months to surpass annualized revenues of $1 million —four months ahead of the fastest-growing SaaS firms at the height of the subscription boom.

Yet Asia-based founders face a particularly daunting challenge: navigating one of the world’s most comprehensive—and fragmented—payments ecosystems.

“We’re not a monolithic card market in this part of the world,” Singh says.

“We’ve got so many different countries and consumers with all sorts of buying and transaction behaviors.” Stripe on Tuesday unveiled partnerships with a slew of local payment platforms, including South Korea’s Samsung Pay, Malaysia’s Touch ’n Go, Singapore’s ShopeePay, the Philippines’ GCash, and Thailand’s TrueMoney, which would allow businesses on Stripe’s platform to accept cross-border payments across these smaller payment providers.

“These payment companies are successful in their own right, but what they get with us is distribution,” Singh explains.

Stripe, much like other payments firms, is also paying attention to the budding “agentic economy,” referring to an economic system where AI agents act as independent economic actors on behalf of human users.

Last December, Stripe rolled out the “ Agentic Commerce Suite ”, which uses shared payment tokens that allow AI agents to securely pass buyer credentials to merchants, with early adopters including fashion labels Coach and Kate Spade, and e-commerce platforms Etsy and Halara.

Industry peers like Visa and Mastercard are also making bets on agentic commerce.