Asia's founders are decamping to the U.S. as the region suffers a protracted venture funding slump

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Yoeven 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.