1,625 of 6,106 tracked companies (27%) are based in an emerging market. Classification is country-level: IMF advanced economies (including Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Australia) do not count as EM.

On/Off Ramps is the most EM-skewed category at 67% (402 of 601 disclosed-region cos). Agentic Payments is the least at 12%. The bifurcation tracks where the technology touches the real world: on-ramps, wallets, remittances, and consumer use cases over-index in EM.

943 companies, more than any other category. 170 cos carry 2025 founding dates and 373 carry 2026 so far (recent-year dates are partly proxy-estimated, directional only). 97% of venture-staged cos are Pre-seed or Seed. No other category is forming at this pace.

Agentic Payments added the most new formations of any category with a meaningful base in 2025 (51 cos carry 2024 founding dates, 170 carry 2025). 10 months into 2026, Agentic Payments still leads on new formations. Recent-year founding dates are partly proxy-estimated, so read formation rankings as directional, not as exact growth rates.

Wallet Infrastructure leads on maturity with 22.3% of its venture-staged companies past Seed (71 of 318), followed by Stablecoin Infrastructure at 19.5%. 0 of the 12 categories have more than a quarter of companies past Seed. At the other end, just 3.1% of Agentic Payments cos are. Formation has dramatically outpaced graduation past Seed.

MoonPay and Stripe have taken 3 of 22 confirmed acquisitions each (MoonPay: Iron, Meso, Helio · Stripe: Bridge $1.1B, Privy, Valor Connect). Other acquirers in the wave: Fireblocks (2), Polygon (2), Amadeus Protocol, Checkout.com, Circle. The big-payments incumbents are buying their way into stablecoin infra rather than building.

279 of 465 tracked African companies operate in Nigeria. Kenya (45) and South Africa (43) trail distantly. Africa's stablecoin story is effectively a Nigerian one.

203 of 297 tracked MENA companies operate in the UAE, the most concentrated regional story outside the US. Dubai's VARA framework and Gulf capital flows produce a cluster you don't see elsewhere.

182 of 718 APAC companies operate in Singapore. Hong Kong (111), India (85), and Australia (78) form the tier-2 cluster. Singapore's MAS licensing regime is producing the region's only clear hub.

Of 498 LatAm companies tracked, 101 sit in On/Off Ramps, ahead of Cross-Border B2B Payments (74).

559 of 1,576 recently-founded companies with disclosed region are based in North America, far ahead of Europe (322) and combined emerging markets (581). The agentic-payments wave that's driving 2025-2026 formation is heavily concentrated in US tech hubs, even as the all-time EM share holds at 27%.

40% of all tracked companies sit in just five countries: United States (1,445), United Kingdom (302), Nigeria (279), Canada (210), United Arab Emirates (203). Four of the five are the largest country in their region. Outside the top 5, no other country tops Singapore's 182 companies.