USAID left an $80B hole in your expansion plans.

If you’re a frontier tech company trying to scale into Africa or Southeast Asia, or an organization that depended on that funding, your board probably read the news and hit the brakes.

And honestly, it made sense.

USAID wasn’t just another donor. It was the backbone behind huge parts of the health and climate ecosystem across these markets.

Then almost overnight, around 86% of its programs were cut. And nobody really stepped up; the UK, France, and Germany all cut at the same time.

For a lot of companies, it suddenly looked like the funding landscape had disappeared.

But capital has a habit of moving, not vanishing.

With AI investments and valuations, it’s moving into a different set of hands right now.

The OpenAI Foundation is sitting on roughly $220B. Anthropic’s founders have pledged around 80% of their wealth, another ~$90B. Add employee wealth and you’re looking at roughly $370B in potential philanthropic capital.

That money has to land somewhere. And a lot of it lands in the exact markets you’re trying to enter.

That’s why I think two things matter.

First, stay in the market.

We’ve spent the last few years helping teams enter 19+ markets across Africa and Southeast Asia, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. Funding almost always finds the organizations that were already there. The teams waiting for certainty usually arrive too late.

Second, recognize that the people writing the next generation of checks are different from the last. Their wealth came from technology. They’re likely to value speed, execution, and experimentation more than committee-driven decision making. The organizations that adapt to that shift will have an advantage.

So the question isn’t whether funding comes back.

A new pool is already forming.

The question is whether you’ll already have relationships on the ground when it arrives…

…or whether you’ll still be waiting for certainty.

If your expansion plans are on pause, let’s pressure-test them together.