Trasy Lou Walsh and the business of waiting

Trasy Lou Walsh was trying to practise a startup pitch. Her son had the recording job. Her daughter had appointed herself to a rather different position: making faces beside her mother until the rehearsal became difficult to deliver with a straight face. The next day was the Slingshot Top 50 competition. Tonight, the competition for attention was being held at home.

Walsh laughed and carried on. In her account of the evening, the interruptions became part of the preparation. If she could finish the pitch under these conditions, she reckoned she was ready. Any investor can ask a difficult question. A small child can change the entire genre of the presentation.

It is an apt introduction to the Singapore-based co-founder and CEO of Fluid. She has three children, a company she jokingly counts as a fourth, and a career spent dealing with the awkward distance between what people want to happen and what the machinery allows. Her latest subject is the business payment. It has a talent for arriving late.

The invoice keeps its own hours

A supplier sells goods. A buyer wants time to pay. Each has a reasonable preference, and together those preferences create a problem: the supplier needs money to continue doing business while the buyer is still working through its payment terms. A completed sale can leave quite a bit unfinished.

Fluid’s initial proposition addressed that gap. Suppliers could receive payment upfront while buyers paid later. The company took on credit assessment and collection work, integrating with accounting systems, enterprise software and ecommerce platforms. Walsh’s everyday explanation is pleasingly free of financial ceremony: “I help businesses get paid faster without the headaches.”

There is a personal thread running through the explanation. She previously worked on rides, restaurant operations and consumer payments, where making a transaction easier meant understanding the people on either side of it. At Fluid, the two sides have businesses to run. An improvement in the payment process has to survive their existing routines.

A room with no rent

The idea began to take shape at Atome. Customers asked Walsh whether the flexible payment options available to consumers could also serve business buyers. She investigated, but held off on starting alone. Then Steven Li, whose background was in product and technology, suggested building something together.

An early validation conversation came through a LinkedIn message to Logan, the founder of Singapore B2B marketplace Eezee. Coffee followed. So did a discussion about financing and credit terms. Eezee became an early customer. Ruoyun Yang, with experience in private credit, supplied another essential part of the founding team.

Fluid began in 2023. Meetings took place in Walsh’s condominium function room because it was free. Friends helped without charging. Those are useful details to hold beside the later funding figures: before there was a company with a public track record, there were people willing to lend a room, some time or a first order.

Starting also meant learning which responsibilities could be shared and which expertise had to be recruited. For a business advancing money, the ability to build software was only one part of the job. The founding team brought commercial operations, product and debt-financing experience into the same conversation.

The operating years

Walsh’s route into technology included an MBA at HKUST Business School, completed in 2013. She had previously worked in hospitality marketing. Years later, she pointed to a consulting class on business model innovation as a lesson that helped her secure her first Uber role.

Her Uber career included general management and leadership of restaurant operations for Uber Eats in Asia Pacific. At Atome, she worked on the consumer buy now, pay later business as a general manager and then regional general manager. Expansion was familiar territory by the time she started Fluid.

She has described the value of sharing market-launching playbooks across countries, using data in decisions and hiring for potential. Those concerns are recognisably operational. A company can spend a great deal of time discovering something another team already knows; getting that knowledge to travel is itself a management task.

Earlier relationships also found their way into Fluid. In 2024, Walsh welcomed her former Uber boss, Shri Chakravarthy Gopalakrishnan, to the company’s Singapore LaunchPad office. He was then at Ninjacart; their discussion concerned payment terms for vegetable importers. They posed beside a company value about building for the long term. The phrase had a fairly concrete illustration standing in front of it.

When the team gets bigger

In February 2024, Fluid announced a US$5.2 million Series A led by Insignia Ventures Partners. Added to a US$1.8 million seed round from Iterative and New Stack Ventures, it brought announced funding to US$7 million. The plans included expanding risk and engineering teams and working with larger suppliers.

These figures describe the company’s capital, rather than Walsh’s personal wealth. Their significance in her story is the work they enabled: building a team around a product that needed both technical development and the judgement involved in extending credit.

At the end of 2024, Walsh reported ninefold growth in gross merchandise value over 2023, a team expanding from five people to 33, and seven-digit annual recurring revenue. Her Singapore and Malaysia teams came together for a year-end celebration. Each number belongs to that particular moment, when the company was completing its second year.

The year also brought a place in Founders Forum’s 100 Women Founders to Watch. Recognition adds a public marker to a career. A larger team changes its daily texture. More people now need to understand the customer problem, make decisions about it and work together on the answer.

After the sale, before the money

Walsh’s attention subsequently widened to the work surrounding payment. In her 2025 writing, she described business orders arriving through messages and phone calls, delivery documents needing verification, and incoming payments requiring manual matching. Financing was one part of a longer sequence.

Her argument placed credit within that sequence, alongside collection and reconciliation. The practical test is whether a system fits how suppliers actually trade. A transaction may begin in a conversation, pass through a delivery and end in an accounting entry. Software needs to keep up with all three.

At SuperAI in 2025, she set out examples of the work Fluid was targeting: checking delivery documents and bills, reconciling payments, making credit decisions and organising collections. These are ordinary business tasks with repetitive steps. Their ordinariness is part of their appeal as a problem to solve.

Later that year, she described a seafood distributor whose growing sales left him entering invoices and chasing payments in the afternoon. The story makes the opportunity legible. Selling more can produce more administration along with more revenue. Someone still has to close the loop.

By November 2025, Walsh said Fluid worked with 3,000 businesses in Singapore and Malaysia. AI agents were being used internally and tested with a limited group of distributors. She also discussed a less glamorous constraint: some customers used older accounting systems, making integration slower than with cloud software.

That distinction matters to the person running the business. Building connections to older systems takes time; focusing on cloud users shapes who can adopt the product. The ambition may be broad, but the next decision can be as specific as which accounting system to support.

The furniture of family life

At home, the organising problem has its own cast. Walsh timed the start of Fluid for when her children were two, four and six and school routines were becoming part of family life. In March 2025, she described her household as three human children and one startup.

Her humour extends to smaller preferences. She enjoys musicals and named Wicked as a recent favourite. Her choice of gelato is pistachio, the first flavour she tried. The details give the reader something other than a job title to remember.

Family support has also taken a very physical form. Before a lender visit, her children helped clean Fluid’s office and put the company values on the wall. Her husband assembled phone booths with Steven Li. A statement about teamwork was followed by actual assembly work.

“Startup is never just your business; it’s your whole family’s journey.”

Trasy Lou Walsh

She described the weekend as a chance for the children to participate in hard work and shared purpose. It is a more specific account of founding than the usual calendar full of meetings. Somebody has to prepare the office. Somebody has to keep the rehearsal going. Sometimes the people helping are also the people pulling faces.

Passing the lesson along

Walsh has returned to her own educational starting point by speaking with HKUST MBA students about Singapore’s startup ecosystem and taking them through LaunchPad. The consulting-class lesson that helped her enter technology now comes with years of operating experience and a company of her own.

Her stated ambitions include encouraging younger women to build, showing her children what starting from scratch involves, and making her mother proud. They give the work a scale beyond the next funding round, while remaining attached to particular people.

For now, her business concerns something those people would readily understand: work completed, money awaited, time spent chasing. Walsh is trying to shorten that interval. She has already learned to deliver a pitch while the audience refuses to sit quietly.