Surfin, a financial technology platform dedicated to serving the underserved middle class, announced it has raised $12.5 million from Insignia Ventures Partners. This funding round comes as Surfin announces its service to 60 million individuals across eight countries on three continents, with about $2.7 billion in cumulative transactions.
Launched in 2017 and headquartered in Singapore, Surfin began with consumer lending and expanded into a suite of financial services including payments and remittance, credit card issuance, and wealth management. Utilizing AI and analytics, Surfin is committed to offering an ecosystem of transparent and innovative financial services to the growing middle class that is often overlooked by traditional banking systems.
The company has a notable presence in Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Uganda, and Australia. And in Indonesia, its largest market, Surfin holds licenses for P2P lending, mutual fund distribution, remittance, and payment gateway services.
This Series A funding round marks Surfin’s first external funding since its launch, having been bootstrapped and self-financed without any third-party debt.
Last year, Surfin launched Ayovest in Indonesia, a mutual fund trading platform designed for young, first-time investors to invest productively and safely, starting from as low as IDR 10,000. Ayovest has been operating under the license of the OJK since its inception. Also in 2023, Surfin established its credit card business in Mexico called Sufinc in partnership with Visa. Sufinc provides a credit card designed to strengthen Surfin’s consumer finance presence in Central America, with flexible payment terms, no annual fees, and global acceptance.
Over 2,500 people across the globe have joined Dr Wu on Surfin’s mission. Its leadership team includes former Shopee, Akulaku, and Baidu executives. Surfin is also advised by a board composed of accomplished and multi-hyphenate finance.
Surfin’s ecosystem of products is powered with a unified credit scoring engine, enabled by AI and data analytics. This core technology allows Surfin to lend sustainably at scale across different geographies and enter new financial service use cases.
KEY QUOTES:
“Surfin’s vision has always been to build a financial technology services ecosystem on top of our scalable and sustainable risk management system, powered by AI and big data. This system has been stress-tested by the behavior of 60 million users across three continents. Recently, we’ve leveraged this system to launch remittance, payment, wealth management, and credit card services, deepening our mission of financial inclusion in the markets where we operate.”
-Surfin’s Founder and CEO Dr. Yanan Wu
“Surfin has the potential to reshape financial mobility and inclusion for millions of families globally. I have a long-standing interest in asymmetric information in markets and the challenges it presents. Surfin’s approach to addressing the information challenges of credit access through AI and data science is innovative and much-needed. It’s a privilege to support its mission of advancing financial inclusion.”
-Surfin’s Board Member, Nobel laureate Michael Spence
“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. We are privileged to be working with Dr Wu and his team to scale their financial services ecosystem further, both in terms of reach and use cases.”
-Founding Managing Partner Yinglan Tan
