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

Business analytics 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, ten ventures are from Southeast Asia and address areas such as consumer lending, insurance and payments.

With six companies, Singapore is the most represented nation in Southeast Asia this year, followed by the Philippines and Indonesia, neck to 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 ones in their respective jurisdiction, having attracted interest from the global investors’ 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 lending; Nium, formerly known as Instarem, an embedded finance startup that serve banks, payment providers, and businesses; Bolttech, an insurtech startup; Thunes, a business-to-business (B2B) payment company; and Nansen, an analytics platform that analyzes on-chain data, wallet labels, and blockchain entities including Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.

Coda Payments, Atome Financial, Nium and Bolttech are amongst the most well-funded fintech companies in Singapore, having securely US$715 million, US$600 million, US$264 million and US$247 million in funding, respectively.

Nansen is a fast-growing startup that counts among its customers 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 new Latin American markets.

In addition to Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines are the other two Southeast Asian countries featured in this year’s Fintech 250. Each of these countries features two companies: Pluang, a financial app that provides digital micro-savings products, and Xendit, a payment specialist serving businesses, from Indonesia; and Voyager Innovations, the owner of payment 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 US$538 million in funding. The company serves customers like Samsung Indonesia, Grab Pay, Ninja Van Philippines, Qoala, Unicef Indonesia, Cashalo and Shopback.

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

A total of 32 fintech companies from Asia-Pacific (APAC) are part of 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 has two companies in the list, which besides 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 chosen based on factors including funding, market potential, business relationships, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty.

The Fintech 250 Class of 2022 includes 144 repeat winners which were featured on last year’s list, 16 which made their way back onto the list after winning in a prior year, as well as 90 new winners. New winners include Africa-focused payment services providers MFS Africa, TeamApt and Paga.

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

Payments processing and networks is 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 investing and wealth management with 17 (7%).

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