Happy Friday, today we are light on news as we have an excerpted interview with the CEO of Aspire from last week’s Money20/20 event.
Have a great weekend!
Moving to the US market isn’t a challenge many startups in Southeast Asia take on, but Singapore-based fintech Aspire is doing exactly that. It entered the market last month having hired David Harris, a six-year veteran of Revolut, last year to lead the business Stateside.
Taking on the likes of Ramp, Airwallex and Brex on American soil might seem like a futile exercise, but Aspire CEO and co-founder Andrea Baronchelli believes that building in Southeast Asia gives his business an edge.
“We started very early (2018) as one of the first to do business neobanking plus software on top,” he told Asia Tech Review. The demand for clients to do business in multiple countries, and some inefficiencies are among the factors that helped it chart its initial course.
Baronchelli believes those US peers are also trying to figure out their offerings at the same time Aspire is. Which is ironic since he moved to Southeast Asia to start e-commerce business Lazada, which heavily copied the Amazon playbook when starting up more than a decade ago.
Aspire has raised around $200 million to date. Its most recent $100 million Series C round was announced in 2023 and it included participation from Lightspeed, Sequoia and PayPal Ventures.
“It’s very, very much at the beginning. It’s not often that someone in this part of the world (Southeast Asia) is so far ahead with core players in the US trying to figure out the same thing,” he added.
It’s not straightforward to explain what Aspire is building. The company calls itself “the finance OS for modern businesses” because it has all mission-critical services in one place. Baronchelli simplifies the explanation as an inevitable convergence that we’ve seen in other walks of life.
“Do you remember when you used to go around with a phone and a camera? Now you just carry a smartphone, it’s easier having one device that can take pictures, text and do more,” he said.
In simple terms, Aspire wants to merge core business banking with ERP and back office processes and services. For example, putting invoicing, payroll, expenses, supply and more on the same platform as corporate banking, which includes multi-currency and global accounts from day one.
“The finance back office used to be that thing you have in the corner. Now we make it the centre, making sure your data points are integrated into how you run your business,” he explains.
The Aspire stack makes sense for new business, it can be used right from incorporation to securing a bank account and even invoicing, but bigger fish are harder to catch. There, typically the entry point is around specific features like procurement approval, expenses management or company cards. From there, Aspire works to bring in more services or eventually the full stack.
That combination started out as a logical convenience for companies, but with the growth of AI (yes, we had to go there) Aspire could unlock even greater value by enabling companies to run analysis and intelligence across all parts of their finances, without running into silos. Already, it uses AI agents to help pull data for invoices and expenses, but the impact stands to be greater if a company’s data is all held on the platform.
Like many others in the fintech and banking worlds, Aspire is also investigating how it can integrate stablecoins. Baronchelli suggests that “programmable money,” which has become the finance industry’s term, will play a huge role in the future of banking infrastructure, particularly with the type of multi-geography, multi-currency businesses that make up large chunks of Aspire’s claimed base of 50,000 business users.
Aspire has grown to more than 600 staff with more than 10 licences across eight markets. It’s one of Southeast Asia’s most capitalised fintechs and highly visible across the regional ecosystem. That’s a long way from the original startup days, but the CEO is as energised as ever.
“If I started something new, I would be doing the same thing,” he said. “Banking integration is going to be the default and we want to be one of the top players.”
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