Across Southeast Asia, a new generation of founders is abandoning the patient, country-by-country expansion playbook of their predecessors, reaching for global markets before their home models are fully proven. Stripe's new partnerships with regional payment platforms — GCash, ShopeePay, TrueMoney, and others — are the infrastructure answering that ambition, stitching together a continent of fragmented payment ecosystems into something traversable. Beneath the transactional mechanics lies a deeper wager: that the companies willing to build for a future of AI-driven autonomous commerce today wi