“Going to the U.S.
to build companies is still very popular and we see that happening at scale,” Grimeland said at the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 Summit in Vietnam on Nov.
“[But] for the first time ever in one of these platform shifts, there are real advantages in Asia that will lead to a lot of the leading companies being built out of here.” According to Crunchbase data, investors poured $42.8 billion into startup funding rounds across all of Asia in the second quarter of 2026—the highest quarterly total in over three years.
In Grimeland’s telling, several factors make Asia an appealing home for startups: a rapidly growing electricity grid, and an abundance of advanced chips and AI engineering talent.
“If you look at global power production, there’s four times more power being generated and built in Asia per year than in Europe and the U.S.
combined,” he explained.
“Most of that is in China, but [it’s happening] in the rest of Asia as well… the cost of power has gone down drastically compared to what you can access in the U.S..” Asia, too, is leading in the physical AI realm.
“All the leading companies in that space are here,” Grimeland said.
“There’s very, very few autonomous vehicles on the streets in the U.S….
[but there’s] one company in China that has more autonomous vehicles on the streets than the rest of the world combined.” Uneven growth Yet, the allocation of venture funding remains hugely uneven within Asia.
Thus far in 2026, 68.1%—or $96.1 billion of $141 billion—of VC funds entering Asia flowed into China, mainly to AI startups such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and StepFun, according to Dealroom data.
By contrast, only....
