With the rise of AI, Asian tech founders are now thinking about global markets even when they are 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.

For founders, that shift can compress decisions that used to come later in a company’s life cycle: where to incorporate, how to collect payments, and which markets to support first. It also helps explain why Stripe is seeing more early demand for infrastructure that can handle multiple currencies, local payment methods and cross-border checkout from the outset.

“We’re seeing a significant shift in how Asia-based firms are looking at cross-border business,” Sarita Singh, Stripe’s regional head and managing director for 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.”

That marks a departure from the earlier playbook for many Asian companies, which Singh describes as a “thoughtful but slower approach” to international expansion. “Businesses would first build for a local market,” she says. “They would then iterate the product and methodically expand country-by-country, building local banking relationships as they go.”

AI-native firms are also 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 revenue of $1 million — four months ahead of the fastest-growing SaaS firms at the height of the subscription boom.

Asia-based founders still face a difficult challenge, however: 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.”

On Tuesday, Stripe unveiled partnerships with several local payment platforms, including South Korea’s Samsung Pay, Malaysia’s Touch ’n Go, Singapore’s ShopeePay, the Philippines’ GCash and Thailand’s TrueMoney. The integrations 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 is also focusing on the emerging “agentic economy,” a term for an economic system in which AI agents act as independent economic actors on behalf of human users. Last December, Stripe launched its “Agentic Commerce Suite,” which uses shared payment tokens that allow AI agents to securely pass buyer credentials to merchants. Early adopters include fashion labels Coach and Kate Spade, as well as e-commerce platforms Etsy and Halara.

Other payments companies are making similar bets. In April, Visa unveiled its Intelligent Commerce platform, which allows AI agents to shop and pay on a user’s behalf. In June 2026, Mastercard launched “Agent Pay for Machines,” an infrastructure extension designed for high-frequency, low-value machine-to-machine microtransactions.

Singh says the global agentic economy is still in its early days. For now, Stripe is focused on helping businesses prepare for the transition when it arrives.

“What you don’t want is for businesses to build their tech stacks only for them to have to rebuild soon after,” she says.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.