“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.”
