Moses
Lo.

The thing about Moses Lo is that he is currently running a payments company that processes a meaningful share of Indonesia's digital economy, and he is doing it from a 14-hour time-zone split, with his head office in Jakarta and his desk often in San Francisco. He is the co-founder and CEO of Xendit. The company turned eleven this year. He still answers his own emails.

Xendit's product is unglamorous in the way that only good infrastructure is unglamorous. It does virtual accounts, bank transfers, e-wallets, credit cards, subscriptions, payouts, reconciliation, KYC, and most of the other plumbing required to move a rupiah, a peso, or a ringgit from one entity to another. Marketplaces and SMEs use it because the alternative is wiring directly into a stack of legacy banks across a stack of fragmented jurisdictions. Xendit is, in the company's own framing, the rails.

The origin story has been re-told enough that Lo himself sometimes seems amused by it. In 2014 he was an MBA student at Berkeley Haas. He was, by his own admission, lonely in the sense that any first-year graduate student is lonely - a new city, no real Asia network, and a brain full of business school case studies. So he cold-emailed roughly a hundred people at Berkeley whose names sounded Indonesian. Four wrote back. Two showed up for coffee. Those two coffees introduced him to other coffees, and within a few months Lo had a small constellation of co-conspirators who eventually, with him, would walk into the Y Combinator interview as a bitcoin remittance company.

They got in. Xendit became the first Indonesian company ever accepted by Y Combinator, in the Summer 2015 batch. Six weeks into the program, the bitcoin remittance idea wasn't working. Volumes were not where they needed to be. Lo, by his telling, sat the team down and made the call to pivot. They kept the same people. They asked merchants in Indonesia what was actually painful about taking money online. The answer was almost everything. So they built rails. They've been building rails ever since.

In March 2021, Xendit raised a $64.6M Series B led by Accel. Months later, Tiger Global led a $150M Series C, vaulting the company into unicorn territory and giving Lo the dubious honor of being the founder of Indonesia's first YC-minted unicorn. He has been on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The Asian Banker has handed Xendit a Best Payments Initiative award. CNBC named the company to its Upstart 100. There are awards on the shelf, but if you listen to Lo talk for long enough, the awards don't seem to be the point.

The point is more like this: Lo grew up around an entrepreneurial father who, in interviews, he credits with the underlying idea that building a business is a normal thing for a person to do. He read finance and information systems at the University of New South Wales. He spent two years inside Boston Consulting Group in Sydney - the part of his resume that taught him how to think in frameworks. He started a tailored menswear company in 2012 called Barker Bespoke, a side door into entrepreneurship aimed at the perfectly defensible problem of men in suits that don't fit. He spent time inside Amazon's Retail Leadership Development program. Then he went to Berkeley Haas, sent the emails, and built Xendit.

What's instructive about the path is what's missing from it. Lo is not a particularly loud founder. He does not post a thread every Friday. He doesn't appear to have a strong opinion about any of the running culture wars of the venture industry. He has given interviews to Tatler, Gold House, the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, his alma maters at UNSW and Haas, and a handful of regional outlets. The Lo public record is mostly: do the work, name the thing, ship the thing, repeat next quarter.

That makes the rare quote feel sharper. On finding co-founders: "these are certain qualities I want, most important being commitment. Someone that you can build things with; you can argue with." On product: "build something people want," which is the YC catechism delivered without any irony at all, because for him it actually worked. On the hardest stretch of Xendit, when COVID erased eighty to ninety percent of the business in a matter of weeks: "you give up, or you cry and work harder." Xendit, famously, did not give up. The post-COVID Xendit is roughly five times the company it was before.

There is one Moses Lo line that gets quoted more than the others, and it sums up how he picks problems. "No one was as good as what we wanted, so we built it ourselves." It is the Xendit founding myth in twelve words. It also explains why Xendit's team eats a lot of its own infrastructure: the company runs its hiring through "trial days" rather than interview rounds, because traditional interview loops were not, in Lo's view, good enough to find the people he wanted. So he built that himself, too.

The Xendit Lo is shipping in 2026 looks different from the Xendit of 2018. It has roughly 800 employees. It operates across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. It serves both nimble SMEs and large enterprise customers. Its product surface area now spans payment acceptance, payout APIs, multi-currency treasury, KYC, virtual cards, subscription billing, and a growing layer of automated reconciliation and fraud detection. In May 2026, Xendit closed a roughly $50M debt facility - the company's continuing answer to the question of how to fund cross-border growth without giving up more of the cap table.

What he is actually building, if you squint, is less a payments company and more a foundational layer for digital commerce in a region that has historically had to glue its own. Southeast Asia is six languages, six currencies, six regulators, six payment cultures and roughly six hundred million people. The companies that abstract that mess away tend, over time, to become very valuable. Lo is not loudly making that argument. He is quietly billing for it.

Ask him what he's optimizing for, and the answer tends to come back to the same instinct - the contrarian truth question. What do you know that everyone else thinks is false, but is actually true? In the case of Xendit, the bet was that Southeast Asia's payments rails would be built by a Southeast Asian team, in Southeast Asia, for Southeast Asian merchants, and that being far away from Silicon Valley would be a feature rather than a bug. That bet now has a billion-dollar-plus valuation attached to it, but Lo, talking about it in interviews, still sounds like a guy who has another six weeks of work to do before the end of the quarter.

Which is more or less the right answer.