On a humid afternoon in Bengaluru, Raj sits at a corner table in Third Wave Coffee on Church Street. Across from him is a founder building a B2B SaaS workflow-automation tool for mid-market logistics companies—barely six months old, with a handful of paying pilots and a seed round almost stitched together. The product works. The pitch deck is nearly there.

What’s holding things up is a question that sounds deceptively simple: where should the company live?

Raj, who prefers to be addressed by only his first name, works at a boutique advisory firm that helps early-stage Indian startups decide exactly this: how to structure themselves for capital, customers, and eventual exits? His job, more often than not, is to translate legal geography into survival math.

He lays out three options.

Delaware, in the US. The default. A C-CorpA legal structure for a corporation where the company's assets are separate from the owners' assets. That means the owners and shareholders are taxed separately from the corporation every US investor understands, backed by a century of corporate case law and a legal system that global venture capital has memorised.

The next is Singapore. Cleaner tax treatment, treaty advantages, and a fund ecosystem Indian founders know almost as well as their own backyard. Structures like the variable capital company A corporate structure for multiple investment funds that allows them to be housed under one entity, yet function with flexibility(VCC) that everyone already navigates on autopilot.

Then there’s the third option: newer, in-house, and carrying a certain ideological weight. Gift City, the dollar-denominated financial enclave on the outskirts of Gandhinagar, that India pitches as a way to onshore global capital from abroad. Earlier in 2025, its regulator, the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA), turned five, and to showcase how far the experiment has come, it hosted journalists at the Gift City in December.

The founder leans back in his chair when Raj suggests the third option. Within seconds, the questions start flying.

“Will US VCs invest in an IFSC company?