SUNRATE.

Every business that decides to sell into a new country runs into the same wall. Not the product, not the customer - the payment. Getting money in, getting money out, converting it, hedging it, and reconciling the whole mess across banks that were never built to talk to each other. SUNRATE was founded in 2016 to knock that wall down.

The company is headquartered in Singapore, with offices in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai and London. Its pitch is deliberately unglamorous: a single platform, and a single set of APIs, through which a business can send payments in more than 130 currencies to over 190 countries and regions, collect funds in 30-plus currencies as if they were local, issue multi-currency commercial cards, and manage foreign exchange and treasury from the same dashboard.

That framing comes straight from the founders' resumes. Co-founder and CEO Paul Meng spent years at Citibank and Standard Chartered - close enough to the machinery of correspondent banking to see exactly where it failed the mid-size businesses that banks tend to under-serve. He built SUNRATE with co-founders Jacky Chan and Joshua Bao around a simple bet: that companies shouldn't need six vendors and a spreadsheet to move one cross-border payment.

Who actually uses it

SUNRATE's customers are the businesses you rarely see - the merchants, marketplaces, online-travel platforms, logistics operators and trade-finance firms sitting behind consumer brands. They share one trait: money that has to cross a border, in volume, reliably. For a travel platform paying hotels in a dozen countries, or an e-commerce seller collecting in local currencies and settling at home, the friction SUNRATE removes is not abstract. It is a line item.

In March 2025 the company took that logic somewhere unexpected: the open ocean. At Sea Asia 2025 it launched a maritime payments solution built for shipping companies - crew payroll, travel expenses and supplier disbursements paid across 130-plus currencies. It is a reminder that the deepest cross-border pain often sits in the oldest industries, not the newest.

The moat almost nobody wants to build

What separates SUNRATE from a long list of payment startups is less visible than a slick app. It is a principal member of both Mastercard and Visa - a status that takes years of licensing, capital and compliance to earn, and which most fintechs simply rent from someone else. It settles through a network of banking partners that reads like a Wall Street roll call: Citibank, Standard Chartered, Barclays and J.P. Morgan.

When SUNRATE wanted to add global acquiring - the ability to accept and settle card payments end to end - it did not post a job listing. In 2024 it acquired an entire experienced payments team, folding proven talent into the business rather than rebuilding the capability from scratch. In regulated markets, speed is a talent story as much as a technology one.

How it makes money

The business model is classic financial infrastructure. SUNRATE earns from the spread on currency conversion, from transaction and processing fees, from interchange on the commercial cards it issues as a principal network member, and from treasury and service fees. Its revenue rises with the volume and value of the flows its customers push through the platform - which is why breadth of currencies, countries and use cases matters so much to the story.

That places SUNRATE in a crowded, well-funded corner of Asian fintech, alongside names like Airwallex, Nium, Thunes and Wise. Its differentiation is bundling: payments, collection, cards, FX and treasury tools such as TreasuryOS and RiskOS under one roof, aimed squarely at businesses that would otherwise stitch those functions together themselves. Investors have noticed - the 2023 Series D drew Prosperity7 Ventures, the growth fund of oil giant Aramco, and Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia, now Peak XV Partners, with SoftBank Ventures Asia along for the round.

Three consecutive years on FXC Intelligence's Top 100 cross-border payment companies (2024, 2025 and 2026) suggest the market takes the bet seriously. Infrastructure, after all, is invisible by design. When it works, nobody talks about it - which, for a company that pays ship crews and settles marketplace sellers in currencies most people can't name, is rather the point.