Best Countries to Research for Startup and Venture Investing Access

Answer first: where should startup and venture research start?

For startup and venture access research, the 2026 Hide My Cash country snapshot includes the United States, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and South Korea. The United States has strong market-depth and listed-exit signals, Canada combines banking strength with broad listed-company depth, Japan adds deep public-market and banking signals, Switzerland scores strongly on governance, capital mobility and credit quality, and South Korea combines capital mobility, banking, listed-market depth and sovereign-credit strength. These are jurisdiction research signals, not startup picks. The United States, Canada and Japan tie at 100 for market depth; the United States and South Korea tie at 96 for stocks/ETF access. Current market-depth scores for all five countries use selected World Bank/Data360 observations from 2025. The US, Canada, Japan and Switzerland use curated stocks/ETF access research; South Korea uses measured market depth for that score. None of these five uses the GDP-per-capita fallback. The older figures retained in the cards are historical, not the selected inputs to current scores.