Fintech firm Surfin has raised US$12.5 million in Series A funding from Insignia Ventures Partners.
Surfin began with consumer lending and has since expanded into various financial services, including payments, remittance, credit card issuance, and wealth management.
The company leverages AI and data analytics to support its operations, enabling it to provide scalable financial services tailored to the needs of the underserved middle class.
Founded in 2017, Surfin is headquartered in Singapore, currently operates across nine other countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico, the Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Uganda, and Australia.
Surfin reported that it has facilitated approximately US$2.7 billion in transactions, reaching 60 million users across three continents.
This latest funding round marks Surfin’s first external investment after being bootstrapped since its inception.
Surfin plans to expand its financial services, aiming to reach a broader range of consumers across different income levels.
The company intends to offer a wider range of products, including robo-advisory and remittances, as it looks to grow its presence in additional markets.
Surfin has secured multiple licenses across various jurisdictions, with Indonesia being its largest market, where it holds licenses for P2P lending, mutual fund distribution, and remittance, while a payment gateway license is currently pending approval.
The company has also introduced key products such as Ayovest, a mutual fund trading platform in Indonesia that allows young, first-time investors to start with a low minimum investment of IDR 10,000.
It has also launched Sufinc, a credit card service in Mexico in partnership with Visa, which allows customers to make payments globally with no annual commission.
Its advisory board includes Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence and former SGX executive Mohamed Nasser Ismail.
Dr Yanan Wu, CEO and Founder of Surfin, said,
“Surfin’s vision has always been to build an ecosystem of financial technology services on top of our existing scalable and sustainable risk management system powered by AI and big data. It is a system that has already been stress-tested by 60 million users‘ behavior across three continents.
More recently we’ve leveraged this system to launch remittance, payments, wealth management and credit card services that are taking our mission of financial inclusion deeper across the markets we are already present in.”
Yinglan Tan, Founding Managing Partner of Insignia Ventures Partners added,
“Surfin represents two key shifts in the way companies are growing from Southeast Asia. It is a company headquartered and operating in the region, but with a multi-country presence and global ambitions from early on. It is also a company leveraging the wave of AI transforming industry to deliver more equitable credit access to the underbanked.
In a space that is highly competitive and challenging at scale, this combination of proven multi-market entry with licensed multi-jurisdiction products and robust risk management capabilities positions them in a unique place to scale. Their operational track record is more impressive considering they have been bootstrapped thus far.”
Featured image credit: Edited from Freepik