Stripe sees Asian AI startups expanding abroad faster than ever

Stripe’s Southeast Asia head says AI-focused founders in the region are entering multiple foreign markets within a year, even while their products are still being defined.

Sarita Singh, Stripe’s regional head for Southeast Asia, Greater China and South Korea, reports that AI-centric startups in Asia are now targeting overseas customers almost immediately, with Singapore-based firms averaging entry into seven new markets within a year of founding. This marks a shift from the traditional, cautious expansion model where companies first solidified a domestic base before scaling country by country and establishing local banking ties.

To address the region’s highly varied payment landscape, Stripe announced partnerships with several domestic payment providers, including South Korea’s Samsung Pay, Malaysia’s Touch ’n Go, Singapore’s ShopeePay, the Philippines’ GCash and Thailand’s TrueMoney, allowing merchants on its platform to accept cross-border payments more easily. The company also introduced the Agentic Commerce Suite, which uses shared payment tokens so AI agents can securely transmit buyer credentials to merchants; early users include fashion labels Coach and Kate Spade as well as e-commerce platforms Etsy and Halara.

Competitors Visa and Mastercard are developing comparable agent-focused solutions, with Visa’s Intelligent Commerce platform and Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines. Singh cautions that the agentic economy is still nascent, and Stripe aims to help businesses build flexible tech stacks that won’t need major overhauls as the market evolves.