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.
