10 Southeast Asian Startups Listed on CB Insights’ Top 250 Fintechs

Business analysis platform and global database CB Insights has released its annual selection of the world’s 250 most promising private fintech companies. Among this year’s top 250 fintech companies are ten ventures from Southeast Asia and deal with areas such as consumer loans, insurance and payments.

With six companies, Singapore is the most represented nation in Southeast Asia this year, followed by the Philippines and Indonesia, neck-and-neck with two companies each.

Most of these ten Southeast Asian companies are very well-funded fintech ventures. In many cases, they are among the most funded in their respective jurisdictions, having attracted interest from the global investor community for their reach and growth potential.

In Singapore, these companies are Coda Payments, a provider of cross-border monetization solutions for digital products and services; Atome Financial, a company specializing in buy now pay later (BNPL) and consumer loans; Nium, formerly known as Instarem, an embedded finance startup serving banks, payment providers and enterprises; Bolttech, an insurtech startup; Thunes, a business-to-business (B2B) payment company; and Nansen, an analytics platform that analyzes chain data, wallet tags and blockchain entities including Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.

Coda Payments, Atome Financial, Nium and Bolttech are among the most well-funded fintech companies in Singapore, with USD 715 million, USD 600 million, USD 264 million and USD 247 million respectively secured in funding.

Nansen is a fast-growing startup that counts among its clients the likes of DeFiance Capital, Genesis Block Ventures, Polygon and the team behind Axie Infinity, and Thunes is currently working on expanding overseas, establishing in February 2022 a regional hub in Miami to enter in new Latin American markets.

In addition to Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines are the other two countries in Southeast Asia featured in this year’s Fintech 250. Each of these countries has two companies: Pluang, a financial app offering digital micro-savings products, and Xendit, a payments specialist serving businesses , from Indonesia; and Voyager Innovations, owner of payments and financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, and Tonik Bank, an all-digital bank, from the Philippines.

Xendit is one of the most well-funded fintech companies in Indonesia, having secured a total of $538 million in funding. The company serves customers such as Samsung Indonesia, Grab Pay, Ninja Van Philippines, Qoala, Unicef ​​Indonesia, Cashalo and Shopback.

Voyager Innovations, the digital arm of telco PLDT, operates the digital payment ecosystem PayMaya and the digital bank Maya Bank. PayMaya has over 47 million registered users across its consumer platforms. Maya Bank, which started operations in April 2022, managed to secure over 650,000 customers and PHP 5 billion (USD 89 million) in deposit balances in just three months.

A total of 32 fintech companies from Asia-Pacific (APAC) are on this year’s list. India is the most represented country in the region with 14 companies, including BharatPe, CoinDCX, Cred, Digit Insurance, Pine Labs and Razorpay, followed by Singapore (10) and China (3), with Ant Group, Fenbeitong and Shannon.ai.

Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea each have two companies on the list, which in addition to Pluang and Xendit from Indonesia, and Voyager Innovations and Tonik Bank from the Philippines, are Airwallex and Amaka from Australia, and Toss and WireBarley from South Korea. In Hong Kong, one company, namely WeLab, is part of the list.

CB Insights’ 2022 Fintech 250

CB Insights’ Fintech 250 is an annual list of the 250 fastest growing up-and-coming fintech companies from around the world. These companies are selected from a pool of 10,000+ eligible private companies and are selected based on factors such as funding, market potential, business relationships, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, team strength and technology novelty.

The Fintech 250 Class of 2022 includes 144 repeat winners who were featured on last year’s list, 16 who returned to the list after winning a previous year, as well as 90 new winners. Recent winners include Africa-focused payment service providers MFS Africa, TeamApt and Paga.

The 250 winners represent 33 different countries. 53% of these companies are headquartered in the United States, making it the most represented country. The UK comes second with 31 companies (12%), followed by India with 14 (6%), Brazil with nine (4%) and Germany with seven (3%).

Payment processing and networking are the fintech segments with the most winners, with 33 companies (13%), followed by insurance with 25 (10%), cryptocurrency with 24 (10%), core banking and infrastructure with 19 (8%), and retail investment and asset management with 17 (7%).

The Fintech 250 2022 cohort has raised over $115 billion in equity funding. Ant Group, Klarna and Chime are the most well-funded companies on the list, having secured USD 19.1 billion, USD 4.3 billion and USD 2.9 billion respectively in funding. Of the 250 companies, 159 (64%) are unicorn startups worth USD 1 billion and above.

Featured image credit: edited from Freepik