FinTech Surfin raises $12.5m from Insignia Ventures Partners
By Gloria Mathias
Surfin, a FinTech platform for the underserved middle class, has raised $12.5 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. This funding comes as Surfin serves 60 million lives across 8 countries on 3 continents and has roughly $2.7 billion in cumulative transactions.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Singapore, Surfin launched consumer lending before expanding across financial services such as payments/remittances, credit card issuance, and wealth management. Using AI and analytics, Surfin strives to provide an ecosystem of transparent and innovative financial services to the growing, underbanked middle class. The company is present in Indonesia (since 2018), Vietnam (2018), Mexico (2018), Philippines (2018), Nigeria (2019), Kenya (2019), India (2021), Uganda (2022), and Australia (2023).
As it expanded its presence over the years, the company has accumulated numerous licenses across multiple jurisdictions over the years. In Surfin’s largest market, Indonesia, the company has P2P, mutual fund distribution, remittance, and payment gateway (incoming) licenses.
This series A round is Surfin’s first round of external funding. The company has been bootstrapped since its inception, and lending is done out of its balance sheet with no third-party debt. Dr. Yanan Wu founded Surfin. He has over 26 years of global investment experience, serving institutions and family offices, including stints at CITIC Prudential Fund and TD Asset Management Canada.
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‘ behaviour 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.”
Dr Spence added, “As Surfin addresses the information challenges of credit access through AI and data science, it is a privilege to be able to support its innovations and its mission of advancing financial inclusion.”
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