Scarlett Xiao’s explanation for choosing Indonesia began with its islands. In a September 2022 interview, the founder of SuperAtom pointed to the country’s geography and its demand for financial technology. It was a revealing place to start. A loan looks reassuringly simple on a phone screen. Behind it sit questions of distance: where the money comes from, how a customer is reached, which institution gives permission, and who understands the market well enough to make the whole arrangement work.
Xiao had spent years working on a related problem in mobile internet: taking a business to people in different countries. When she founded SuperAtom in 2018, she brought that experience into consumer finance. Indonesia became the company’s key proving ground through UangMe, its local lending platform. Her story runs through Chinese internet companies, a Singapore base, overseas investors and Indonesian customers. The interesting action happens at the joins.
The business of reaching people
Before there was SuperAtom, there was a career in communications. Xiao worked as a communications manager at Yahoo China and as public relations director at Qihoo 360. From 2008 to 2010, she was a senior manager in Baidu’s enterprise marketing department, focusing on public relations. These were jobs concerned with how a company presented itself and how people understood it, rather than the design of a lending product.
Her move into Cheetah Mobile widened that remit. She became a vice president in October 2010 and a senior vice president in November 2014, with responsibility for business development, marketing and commercial products. In March 2018, she became a director. She earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Renmin University in 1999. Finance, then, was present in her education long before it became the focus of her own company.
By 2016, she was speaking publicly as Cheetah Mobile’s senior vice president for global marketing and business development. That May, Cheetah and Google shared a video case study about mobile advertising through AdMob. Xiao’s comments emphasized the user’s experience of native advertising. The business had an international audience; its commercial work involved finding ways to serve advertising within the apps people were already using.
The following March, Cheetah’s advertising business was relaunched as Cheetah Ads, with a focus on vertical video. The announcement described a reach of more than 600 million users across over 200 countries and regions. Xiao spoke about targeting ads throughout the mobile journey. The scale belonged to Cheetah’s network, but the role was hers: global marketing and business development, making connections between a platform, its customers and commercial partners.
“Cheetah Ads intelligently targets vertical video ads across the entire mobile journey.”
Scarlett Xiao, March 2017
SuperAtom would bring a different transaction into that journey. The phone was still central. The product, the permissions and the relationship with the customer would change.
An archipelago, a starting point
Xiao founded SuperAtom with Johnny Li in 2018. The venture was incubated within Cheetah Mobile, giving the new company a connection to an existing mobile business. Its proposition involved assembling resources across borders: funds from mature markets, technology and business models from China, and operations adapted to Southeast Asia. Each part came from somewhere. Indonesia was where those parts first had to work together for borrowers.
In 2019, Xiao described drawing on resources from Europe, Japan, Singapore and the United States. The Chinese contribution was technology and business models; the Southeast Asian contribution was the market in which they would be put to use. That division of labor gives the venture a more specific shape than the broad promise of taking finance online. It linked places with different resources to customers seeking credit.
Her September 2022 account of Indonesia added another dimension. She saw demand for financial technology across the country’s many islands. She also considered the government supportive of the sector and described its regulatory approach as strong while retaining flexibility. These were her reasons for choosing Indonesia as an important market when she established SuperAtom. Geography and public policy sat together in the explanation.
There is a pleasingly practical quality to that explanation. Islands are less glamorous than a slide announcing a vast addressable market, but they make the question of access tangible. Xiao’s case for Indonesia placed the customer in a real country, with a particular geography and a particular regulator. The app would be delivered into that setting.
Capital meets the local counter
The early financing arrived in September 2019, when SuperAtom announced a $24 million round led by Gobi Partners through its Meranti ASEAN Growth Fund. Cheetah Mobile participated. The company’s earlier home was now also part of its investor story, while Gobi supplied a venture capital relationship that would recur in later announcements.
UangMe had been registered with Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority, OJK, since July 2018. Reporting at the time of the investment described SuperAtom working with local banks and financial institutions to launch the lending platform. Xiao’s aim was to give working people convenient access to credit. She also discussed the Philippines as a prospective second Southeast Asian market, saying the company had obtained a financial license there and was preparing to enter.
The photograph of UangMe’s stand at Fintech Days 2018 supplies a small, useful corrective to the abstraction of a platform. There is a counter, a member of staff and a promise of financial access printed on the display. A mobile service still has to introduce itself. For a founder with a background in communications and commercial partnerships, that side of the work is a familiar part of the business.
The two founders’ connection also matters. Xiao and Li brought SuperAtom into being together; the company’s association with Cheetah provided an existing network of experience and resources. The venture’s origin was therefore already international in outlook, even while its Indonesian product required local institutions and relationships.
Five million registrations, then a checkout
The next milestones changed the scale and scope of that Indonesian operation. UangMe received its full OJK license in January 2021. The following month, it reached five million registered users. Registration is a specific measure: it counts accounts rather than proving that every person is an active borrower. Even with that distinction, the figure marks how far the platform had traveled from its launch.
In July 2021, UangMe introduced buy now, pay later. The move placed the service alongside purchases, adding a merchant setting to the existing cash lending business. By the time of SuperAtom’s 2022 financing announcement, 197 McDonald’s restaurants across Indonesia had begun accepting UangMe’s BNPL feature. A company concerned with access to finance was now appearing at an ordinary checkout.
That is a memorable detail because the checkout is so unceremonious. Business strategy may be introduced with impressive nouns; a payment option has to make sense when someone is paying for lunch. The merchant relationship gave UangMe a concrete place in the customer’s day, and supplied another chapter in Xiao’s move from mobile marketing into consumer financing.
Recognition came alongside the product development. In September 2021, Xiao appeared on TNGlobal’s regional list of 50 rising women in tech. The entry described the same cross-border construction that distinguished SuperAtom: lower-cost capital from mature markets combined with Chinese technology and localized business models. Her inclusion was tied to a venture with an identifiable method, rather than simply the fact of being a founder.
Expansion comes with a to-do list
In July 2022, SuperAtom announced a $22 million Series C led by Malaysia’s Nue3 Capital. The new round followed the $24 million investment announced in 2019. Together, the two disclosed rounds amount to $46 million. The money was raised by the company; it is a measure of financing for its operations and plans.
Xiao said the next expansion would begin with Mexico and Latin America, extending the company’s digital banking and credit products into new markets. Her description of the work was unusually easy to picture: “hiring local talent, applying for local financial licenses, and focusing on new product development.” Those words appeared in the July 2022 announcement. They describe an intention and the steps required to pursue it.
The phrasing returns the story to its starting point. A founder can carry experience across a border, but a new operation needs people and permissions in the place where it will serve customers. Xiao’s plan explicitly included those local foundations. Indonesia supplied the model she wanted to replicate; the next countries would require their own work.
In December 2024, Hurun’s Global Cheetahs Index listed SuperAtom in Singapore and named Johnny Li and Scarlett Xiao as its founders. It was another dated recognition of the venture. Xiao’s career, meanwhile, already had a clear through-line: communications, international mobile business, and a financing company assembled from resources in several markets.
Her choice of Indonesia offers the most revealing way into that career. She began her explanation with islands, then moved to demand and regulation. It is a founder’s answer with a map inside it. The distance between capital and a customer can be considerable. Xiao built SuperAtom around the work of connecting them.