Home to more than 1,000 fintech companies, Singapore has emerged over the past couple of years as a fintech powerhouse, a position it rose to thanks to its conducive regulatory landscape, supportive initiatives from the government, and the abundance of capital and investors eager to back the region’s next fintech superstars.
To get a sense of Singapore’s up-and-coming fintech leaders, we’ve compiled a list of the top ten most well-funded fintech companies headquartered in the city-state. For this list, we’ve used data from CB Insights, Dealroom, and official releases, and have excluded debts and loans, focusing solely on equity financing.
Founded in 2011, Coda Payments is a provider of cross-border monetization solutions for digital products and services, enabling digital content publishers to unlock new revenue for their games, apps and services in more than 60 countries.
Coda Payments offers three main products: Codashop, a global marketplace for in-game currencies and content, xShop, a proprietary distribution network that enables publishers to distribute their products through a range of e-commerce and other consumer-facing platforms, and Codapay, an API service that allows game publishers and other digital content providers to accept over 300 payment methods on their own website.
The company, which serves customers such as Activision Blizzard, Tinder, Riot Games and Krafton, Coda Payments has raised US$715 million in funding and is valued at US$2.5 billion, according to data from CB Insights and Dealroom. Coda Payments’ latest round was a US$690 million secured in April 2022.
Founded in 2016, Advance Intelligence Group is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology company that leverages innovative tech and partnerships to build an ecosystem of products and services serving consumers, enterprises and merchants.
Advance Intelligence Group consists of three core business units: Advance.ai, a big data and AI company providing digital transformation, fraud prevention and process automation solutions for enterprise clients in banking, fintech, retail and e-commerce; Ginee, an e-commerce merchant services tech platform serving numerous markets in Southeast Asia; and Atome Financial, a provider of buy, now, pay later (BNPL) and digital lending products in both developed and emerging markets.
Advance Intelligence Group, which claims to be serving 1,000+ enterprise clients, 75,000+ merchants and 20 million+ consumers across 12 markets in Asia and Latin America, has raised US$536 million in funding and is valued at US$2 billion, according to data from CB Insights and Dealroom. The company is reportedly weighing raising about US$300 million in a new funding round, sources told Bloomberg in March.
Atome Financial is a subsidiary of Singapore-based tech unicorn Advance Intelligence Group.
It’s an umbrella business unit made up of three brands: Atome, one of Asia’s fastest growing buy now pay later platforms with 15,000+ retail partners across ten markets; and Kredit Pintar, one of the largest digital lending platforms in Indonesia with 20+ million downloads and more than US$1.5 billion in loans disbursed; and ND Finance, a licensed digital lending platform in mainland China that has disbursed over US$350 million in loans to date.
Last year, Atome Financial inked a 10-year partnership and US$500 million financing deal with Standard Chartered. This year, it received US$45 million from parent company Advance Intelligence Group and entered into an US$100 million debt facility with HSBC Singapore to support its business expansion.
Nium, formerly known as Instarem, is an embedded finance startup that provides banks, payment providers, and businesses of any size with access to global payment services and card issuance solutions.
Nium’s modular platform enables frictionless commerce, helping businesses pay and get paid across the globe with services for pay-outs, pay-ins, card issuance, and banking-as-a-service (BaaS). Once connected to the Nium platform, businesses have the ability to pay out in more than 100 currencies to over 190 countries, 100 of which in real time. Funds can be received in 27 markets, including Southeast Asia, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, India, and the US. Nium’s card issuance business is available in 34 countries, including Europe (SEPA), the UK, Australia and Singapore.
Nium has raised US$264 million in funding and is worth US$1 billion, according to CB Insights and Dealroom data. The startup acquired Singapore-based alternative payments network platform Socash earlier this year, and is reportedly in talks to make another acquisition worth up to US$400 million to drive an expansion in Europe.
Founded in 2020, Bolttech is an insurtech startup that provides a cloud-based tech platform connecting insurers, distributors and customers to make it easier and more efficient to buy and sell insurance and protection products. The company says it is active in 30 markets and serves more than 8.3 million customers.
Last year, Bolttech closed a US$247 million Series A funding round, which the company claimed was the largest ever Series A round for an insurtech company at the time. It’s valued at US$1 billion, according to CB Insights data.
In February 2022, Bolttech completed the acquisition of AVA Insurance Brokers and AVA Insurance Agency, a Singapore-based insurance intermediary and specialist broker, to accelerate the deployment of its insurance exchange in Singapore. The company is now reportedly seeking to raise US$300 million in fresh funds to fuel its expansion plans.
Founded in 2010, M-Daq is a cross-border payments and foreign exchange (FX) company that provides specialized technology-enabled financial services to enterprise customers and other downstream fintech businesses.
M-Daq’s core product, Aladdin, allows e-commerce and other digital platforms to price goods in multiple currencies without any exposure to FX risk and offer various payment options to their customers. This allows international customers across 45 countries to enjoy a localized shopping experience from the point of browsing in their home currency all the way through to the point of purchase.
Since the launch of Aladdin in 2016, M-Daq has processed over S$33 billon of cross-border transactions and served some of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms and Internet firms, including AliExpress, Grab and ByteDance.
M-Daq, which turned net profitable in 2018, has raised US$246 million in funding, according to Dealroom data, its latest round being a S$200 million (US$147 million) Series D closed in August 2021. Since then, the company has acquired rival Wallex, a business-to-business (B2B) cross-border payments provider from Singapore, and expanded its global footprint with the opening of a Japanese office.
Founded in 2014, ShopBack is a cashback reward program available across Asia-Pacific (APAC) that allows online shoppers to receive a small percentage of their purchases on the platform, paid for through affiliate programs by the merchant.
The platform also provides coupons, voucher codes, product comparison, QR code payment, and most recently BNPL through its 2021 acquisition of Hoolah.
ShopBack is available in nine countries, namely Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, and claims 30 million users.
The startup has raised US$230 million in funding, its latest round being a US$80 million Series F secured in June 2022. It said at the time that it would use the proceeds to invest into developing new and innovative products for users and merchant partners, deepen its presence across APAC and build capabilities for public market readiness.
Founded in 2015, Funding Societies is a digital financing and debt investment platform. Licensed in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and operating in Vietnam, the company provides business financing to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is funded by individual and institutional investors.
Funding Societies offers six different products – Business Term Financing, Invoice Financing, Property-backed Secured Investment, Guaranteed Property-backed Investment Revolving Credit Facility and Guaranteed Returns Investment – and says it has disbursed over US$2.6 billion through more than 5.1 million transactions across the region.
The company has raised US$218 million in equity financing and more than US$200 million in debt lines from financial institutions in Europe, the US, and Asia, according to Dealroom data. Its latest round was a US$144 million Series C+ fundraise secured in February 2022.
The company has been pursuing opportunities in the neobanking sector, launching in March 2022 the Elevate virtual card for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Singapore, and investing in April 2022 in Indonesia’s Bank Index.
Singlife with Aviva is a financial services company that provides technology-enabled solutions and a wide range of products and services. The company offers a comprehensive suite of insurance plans, employee benefits, partnerships with financial advisor channels and bancassurance, investment solutions, as well as the mobile-first Singlife Account, and its accompanying Singlife Debit Card, which allows customers to save, spend, earn and be insured all in one app.
Singlife with Aviva’s latest product is electric vehicle (EV) coverage as part of its car insurance policies, becoming thus one of the few local providers of EV insurance in the city-state.
Singlife with Aviva was formed by the merger of Aviva Singapore and Singlife, an insurtech startup founded in 2014. First announced in September 2020 and valued at S$3.2 billion, the merger was the largest insurance deal in Singapore at the time and created one of the largest homegrown financial services companies in Singapore.
The company secured a US$90 million investment from Sumitomo Life Insurance in 2019, bringing its total funding to US$153 million, according to the Business Times of Singapore.
Founded in 2009, MatchMove is a fast-growing fintech company active in digital payments and digital banking.
MatchMove’s proprietary Banking OS enables embedded banking, banking-as-a-service (BaaS), and the capabilities to spend, send and lend within any app. The platform allows businesses and their customers to spend online and offline via instantly issued prepaid cards on major card networks; to send payments through capabilities include peer-to-peer (P2P) domestic transfers, QR payments, cross-border remittances, person-to-merchant (P2M) payments, and mass disbursements to global recipients; and to lend by assigning customers credit scores based on their spending and sending patterns to offer customized lending solutions.
Most recently, the company acquired e-commerce specialist Shopmatic for US$200 million – the first deal in a series of planned acquisitions for MatchMove to create an end-to-end service for companies in Southeast Asia aiming to digitalize their offerings. Shopmatic is an e-commerce website builder that help aspiring entrepreneurs build and grow their businesses online. It claims an ecosystem of over a million e-commerce small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers.
MatchMove is headquartered in Singapore with offices in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines. According to data from Dealroom and CB Insights, the company has raised US$151 million in funding so far.
Featured image credit: Edited from Unsplash
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