If you run an Asia-based startup, the pitch deck may not be the problem. The geography is. Fortune reports that Interfaze founder Yoevan Khemlani started building in Singapore, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in May after realizing “a lot of our customers” who were exploring or buying were “moving to the U.S.” His AI model was trained with a plan that assumed demand would stay local. Instead, the buyer map drifted, and he followed it.

That same pull is showing up in the numbers. Fortune cites KPMG that the U.S. attracted roughly 68% of all startup funding last year, while Asia attracted only 12%. The gap widens in the first quarter of 2026: the U.S. won 80% of all startup funding, while Asia’s share fell to 9.6% (even if funds were stable in absolute terms). The reason is not subtle. Fortune points to massive fundraising rounds for developers like OpenAI and Anthropic, and it lands differently for founders trying to raise in a market where capital is getting concentrated.

For the decision-makers reading this, the headline implication is simple: when the center of gravity shifts, “local” becomes “late.” Asia once attracted tech founders with underpenetrated markets, lower costs, and rising wealth. Cities like Singapore, Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur actively tried to position themselves as tech hubs to challenge San Francisco. But Fortune frames the current environment as a push and pull combo. On the pull side: the U.S. has customers, talent, and capital “in abundance,” according to Jussi Salovaara, Antler’s co-founder and managing partner of Asia. On the push side: regulatory scrutiny and fragmented markets in Asia make it harder to scale with one playbook across borders.

The funding slump is not abstract. Fortune reports that venture funding to Southeast Asian tech firms fell by almost 80% between 2022 and 2024, from approximately $10.1 billion to $2.2 billion. It also notes the region currently accounts for roughly 0.5% to 2% of global VC investment, with most APAC investment concentrated in India and China. And then comes the investor psychology problem: when exits are rare or underwhelming, confidence deteriorates. Salovaara tells Fortune that Southeast Asia “hasn’t offered lucrative exit opportunities for investors,” with “some large IPOs in Southeast Asia, but not as many as the ecosystem needed.”

Even where IPOs happen, the market can send a discouraging signal. Fortune cites Deloitte data: Southeast Asian IPOs raised $6.5 billion last year, a 76% jump. Still, that’s a sliver compared with IPO proceeds in Hong Kong, at $37 billion. It also points out several Southeast Asian companies trading below their offer price. JustCo, a Singapore flexible work company, was trading below its IPO price weeks after its June debut. Foundation Healthcare, the first healthcare business to list on the Singapore Exchange in four years, closed 7.9% below IPO price on its first day of trading on July 8. That matters because it changes how investors underwrite risk and how founders structure timelines.

There’s also a harder-to-measure operational problem: Southeast Asia is not one market. It is a collection of different countries with different go-to-market strategies, which is exactly what Fortune highlights. When Khemlani invests or sells, he doesn’t get to treat the region like a single sandbox. “When you invest in the U.S., you're investing in the whole country,” he says. “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.” In other words, capital that needs speed and scale may prefer one large, coherent demand engine.

Geopolitics and regulation add another layer of friction, especially for China-linked businesses. Fortune includes Justin Li, founder of IndustrialMind.AI, who moved to the U.S. because “B2B start-ups don’t have the best market access in China,” with his company mostly able to serve Chinese customers and the local market. His AI engineer monitors production lines for anomalies and suggests fixes, with most customers in the U.S. and Europe. Fortune also raises a possible comfort gap: Western firms may be uncomfortable working with China-based startups that rely on sharing data, and both U.S. and China have restrictions that make the business model more complex as AI becomes viewed as a strategic technology.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley offers something founders can’t easily replicate remotely: dense founder and engineering networks. Sanjil Jain, an Indian founder who relocated to the U.S. in April to build Drift, an AI-powered platform for robotics engineering, tells Fortune these “whisper networks aren’t anywhere else.” He says they create access to new technologies and make integration faster. After the move, he hired three Americans to join his team of five. He contrasts that with India, where he says it would take longer “to sieve out the exact profile or the craziness in a person who would want to build with us.”

Of course, relocating is not just a plane ticket. Fortune connects the shift to immigration friction too. Last September, Trump raised H-1B visa fees from $5,000 to $100,000, sending shockwaves through corporate America. Fortune reports that Jain, as an Indian citizen, said getting visas is “not easy” and that they were “looking at year-long waits.” It also notes that last month, a U.S. federal court blocked the administration’s highly controversial visa fee hike, ruling it an unauthorized tax. Even with that legal check, the uncertainty itself is a governance and planning problem for any company banking on U.S.-based growth and hiring.

Salovaara stresses that U.S. relocation also requires cultural transitions. In Asia, he says investors often focus on revenue growth and profitability relatively early. In the U.S., the emphasis shifts toward the vision and the problem founders are trying to solve. Some businesses may even fit better in Southeast Asia, where infrastructure and energy can attract different investment patterns. Fortune points to Alternō, a Singapore-incorporated Vietnamese startup building low-cost renewable energy storage using sand-based thermal batteries. If you’re building in Vietnam, Salovaara says, it’s more cost-effective compared to the U.S.

Zoom out one level and the story becomes an ecosystem question. Antler’s guiding philosophy, Fortune reports, is that founders should be able to build successful startups from anywhere. Antler’s CEO Magnus Grimeland told Fortune earlier this year that innovation is possible “from almost anywhere, and at a level they weren’t able to before,” and Antler opened its first Silicon Valley office in 2025, eight years after its founding. Salovaara is hopeful capital will become more evenly distributed as ecosystems mature and attract more talent and capital, so more founders can build from Asia “for the world.”

In the short term, though, Fortune ends with the practical constraint: sales and raising still favor the U.S. Khemlani’s line is blunt. “From a sales standpoint, it’s difficult to reach a global customer base from those countries.” “From a venture perspective, it’s also very hard to raise capital in San Francisco if you’re still in Singapore.” For executives and boards, the stakes are clear. If your growth strategy depends on the startup market translating across geographies, you need to plan for capital concentration, go-to-market mismatches, and regulatory drag. The question is no longer whether Asia can build world-class companies. It’s whether those companies can build them and raise them fast enough before the center of funding pulls talent across the ocean.