You’ve probably had this thought at some point: “I want to sell to US customers, but I’m not American, and I have no idea where to start.” Maybe you’re a freelance designer in Lagos who keeps losing clients because you can’t invoice in dollars. Maybe you’re a developer in São Paulo trying to get approved for Stripe. Or maybe you’re just tired of PayPal eating 5% of every payment because your business is registered somewhere PayPal doesn’t fully trust.
The frustrating part isn’t that forming a US company is impossible for non-residents. It’s that nobody makes it clear how to actually do it. You Google “how to start an LLC as a foreigner” and end up with fifteen tabs open, half of them contradicting each other, none of them mentioning that you’ll also need a registered agent, an EIN, a bank account that will actually let you log in from outside the US, and someone to remind you about the annual filings you didn’t know existed until a $250 penalty showed up.
This is exactly the gap StartGlobal was built to close. The company’s founders ran into this mess themselves. They came to the US as international founders, tried to set up their own business, and got hit with legal fees, confusing paperwork, and at one point a $250,000 penalty from the state for something they didn’t even realize they had to file. That experience is why StartGlobal exists: to give founders outside the US a straight path to owning a real, compliant American company, without needing a lawyer on retainer or a green card.
Why forming a US business is harder than it should be
If you’re not a US citizen or resident, the barriers stack up fast. Most guidance you find online assumes you already have a Social Security number, a US address, and at least a passing familiarity with American tax forms. None of that is true for most founders reading this.
On top of that, every state has its own rules for LLC formation, registered agents, and annual reports. Wyoming wants one thing, Delaware wants another, and if you pick the wrong state for your situation, you might end up paying more in fees than you would have with a smarter choice. Then there’s the matter of actually opening a US bank account, which used to mean flying to the US and showing up at a branch in person, something that isn’t realistic for most international founders.
StartGlobal’s answer is to fold all of that into one platform, so you’re not stitching together a lawyer, an accountant, a registered agent service, and a bank on your own.
What StartGlobal actually does for you
At its core, StartGlobal handles LLC formation for founders in more than 90 countries, and it doesn’t require a US SSN, US citizenship, or a visit to the country. You pick your state (Wyoming and Delaware are common choices because of their privacy protections and business-friendly laws), fill in your business details, and StartGlobal prepares and files the paperwork on your behalf.
Once your LLC is approved, you get your Articles of Organization, which is the official proof that your company exists. From there, StartGlobal helps you get your EIN, the tax ID number the IRS issues that you’ll need for almost everything: opening a bank account, signing up for Stripe, running ads on Google, selling on Shopify. Without an EIN, you’re stuck. StartGlobal treats getting one as a core part of the formation process rather than an afterthought you have to sort out yourself.
Every US LLC also needs a registered agent, a person or company with a physical address in your formation state who can legally receive court documents and state notices on your behalf. If you don’t have one, your LLC can lose its good standing without you even knowing something went wrong. StartGlobal acts as that registered agent, so anything official that shows up gets forwarded straight to you instead of getting lost.
Then there’s banking. StartGlobal partners with providers like Mercury and Lili to help you open a US business bank account without needing to be physically present. For a founder overseas, this alone can be the difference between actually running a business and just having paperwork that says you own one.
The part most services skip: staying compliant
A lot of formation services will happily take your money to file the initial paperwork and then disappear the moment your LLC exists. That’s when the real trouble tends to start, because US LLCs come with ongoing obligations: annual reports, state-specific renewals, and federal filings that vary depending on how your business is structured.
StartGlobal treats this as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-time transaction. Their compliance tools track deadlines for you and send reminders before anything is due, so you’re not the one keeping a mental calendar of fifty different state rules. They also help with bookkeeping and tax filings for both single-member and multi-member LLCs, and they’ll connect you with CPAs and lawyers through the platform if your situation needs more specialized help.
This matters more than it sounds like it does. The founders who get burned aren’t usually the ones who file the wrong form on purpose. They’re the ones who genuinely didn’t know a form existed. StartGlobal is trying to remove that particular way of getting hurt.
What it costs
Formation through StartGlobal runs at a flat $399, and that covers state filing fees, your business tax number setup, registered agent service, and help getting your bank account opened. There’s no vague “starting at” pricing that balloons once you’re already committed.
After that, you have options depending on how hands-off you want to be. You can handle ongoing compliance yourself and pay a smaller a la carte fee starting around $99 a year for the pieces you actually need, or you can go with the fully managed plan at $149 a month if you’d rather not think about any of it. Either way, you know what you’re paying for going in, which is more than you can say for a lot of services in this space that quietly add fees as you go.
The tools beyond formation
Where StartGlobal starts to feel less like a formation service and more like an actual operating system for your business is in the extras it bundles in. There’s a US phone number that rings anywhere in the world, a US mailing address that forwards your mail digitally, and a payments tool for sending invoices and getting paid, all priced around $9.99 a month each rather than locked behind an expensive tier.
There’s also Neo, StartGlobal’s AI agent, which sits inside the platform and helps with the busywork: keeping you compliant, categorizing your books, and answering tax questions so you’re not digging through IRS pages at midnight trying to figure out what a Schedule C is. It won’t replace an accountant for anything complicated, but for the day-to-day questions that used to mean a Google search rabbit hole, it’s a real time saver.
If you’re running a team, StartGlobal also offers its own internal tools for communication and customer support, aimed at giving small operations something like the internal software big companies use, without the complexity or cost of stitching together five separate subscriptions.
Who this actually works for
StartGlobal isn’t only for tech startups chasing venture funding. Its case studies include a craftsperson who built an e-commerce business selling through major platforms, a fintech consultant juggling clients across two continents, and a food entrepreneur building a distribution network for an organic product line from outside the US. What connects these founders isn’t the type of business. It’s that all of them needed a real US legal entity to be taken seriously by American customers, platforms, and payment processors, and none of them wanted to spend months figuring out how to get one.
If you’re running a business that sells primarily outside the US and has no real reason to touch American banks or customers, you probably don’t need any of this. But if American clients, American platforms like Shopify or Stripe, or American banking access matter to how you operate, having a real US LLC changes what’s possible for you.
The bottom line
Forming a US company as someone outside the country used to mean either flying to the US, hiring an expensive lawyer, or muddling through it alone and hoping you didn’t miss something important. StartGlobal was built by founders who went through exactly that and decided the process should be simpler for the next person.
What you get isn’t just a filed LLC. It’s a registered agent watching your mail, an EIN so you can actually get paid, a bank account you can access from wherever you are, and a system that keeps track of the compliance deadlines you’d otherwise have no reason to know about. For a founder building a business from outside the US, that combination is what actually makes “having a US company” mean something, rather than just being a piece of paper you filed once and then worried about forever.
