Company Profile · Fintech
Xendit.
The payments plumbing that lets Southeast Asia get paid.
// Jakarta-born, Y Combinator-raised, quietly running the region's money
The payments plumbing that lets Southeast Asia get paid.
// Jakarta-born, Y Combinator-raised, quietly running the region's money
Open a food-delivery app in Jakarta. Top up a wallet in Manila. Pay a freelancer in Kuala Lumpur. Somewhere between the tap and the confirmation, there's a decent chance the money moved across rails built by Xendit.
Xendit doesn't sell you anything directly. It sells to the businesses that sell to you. It is a payments infrastructure company - the unglamorous, load-bearing kind - that lets startups, marketplaces and global enterprises accept, process and pay out money across Southeast Asia through a single API. Cards, virtual accounts, e-wallets, QR codes, bank transfers, payouts, fraud checks. The boring parts. The parts that, when they break, take a whole business down with them.
Today it operates across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and beyond, employs roughly 800 people, and has been a unicorn since 2021. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of company that succeeds by being invisible.
Most fintech wants to be the face of your wallet. Xendit decided to be the wiring behind the wall instead.
// The bet that nobody applauds until it worksHere is the inconvenient truth the brochures skip: moving money in Southeast Asia is genuinely difficult. Hundreds of millions of people, dozens of banks, a patchwork of e-wallets, QR standards and regulators that don't agree on much - and historically, a lot of cash. For a business trying to collect a payment or send one, that meant stitching together integrations one bank and one wallet at a time. Slow. Expensive. Fragile.
The founders knew the pain personally. The original spark came from a college friend of Moses Lo - a South Sudanese student in Australia working three jobs to wire money back home, watching fees and delays eat into every transfer. The friction wasn't an abstraction. It was somebody's rent.
The hardest market to bank is also the most valuable one to fix. Xendit looked at the mess and saw a moat.
// Friction, reframed as opportunityIn 2015, Moses Lo, Tessa Wijaya, Bo Chen and Juan Gonzalez started building. Their first idea was consumer-facing - a money-transfer app, then a Shopify-style interface for sellers. It didn't fly. The team discovered the unsexy reason: you can't build a great payments app on top of payments infrastructure that doesn't exist. So they did the thing that ambitious founders are usually too proud to do. They threw out the front end and sold the back end.
The internal payment system they'd built to make their own product work became the product. Xendit became the first Indonesian company accepted into Y Combinator - a small line in a press release that signaled something larger: this region was ready to export technology, not just import it.
Then came the move that defines the company's character. During the pandemic, Lo decided to launch in the Philippines - against his investors' advice. Within nine months, Xendit hit an all-time high in new customers. The lesson stuck: in fragmented markets, the operators willing to go local fastest tend to win.
We intend to keep reinvesting in new markets, enhancing our platform, and expanding our business lines so we can seize the biggest and best opportunities.
// Moses Lo, Co-founder & CEOSet the vision and made the contrarian market calls - including the Philippines launch nobody wanted.
Operations and regional expansion; now leading Xendit's push to export its model to Latin America.
Architected the payment engine that turned an internal tool into a regional platform.
Part of the founding team that turned a failed consumer app into infrastructure.
Moses Lo, Tessa Wijaya, Bo Chen and Juan Gonzalez start what becomes Xendit.
Seed backing from YC and East Ventures; the pivot to infrastructure takes hold.
Accel leads the round. Lo launches in the Philippines mid-pandemic - and it works.
A $150M Series C led by Tiger Global pushes the valuation to ~$1 billion.
Co-led by Coatue and Insight Partners; reported valuation around $2.7 billion.
Full acquisition rebrands Payex as Xendit Malaysia after $1.1B in local volume.
Plans to extend the model to Mexico, Colombia and beyond.
What can you actually do with Xendit? In practice, everything a business needs to handle money - without hiring a payments team. Accept payments through 100+ local and international methods. Send money out to bank accounts and wallets, one at a time or in batches. Split funds between sellers in a marketplace. Catch fraud before it lands. Get paid with a link you can create in minutes.
100+ payment methods - virtual accounts, e-wallets, cards, QRIS, online banking - through one integration.
No-code hosted checkout and payment links with real-time status notifications.
Split payments, sub-accounts and money-flow orchestration for marketplaces and platforms.
API-triggered and batch disbursements for payroll, refunds and loans across the region.
Automated fraud detection and identity verification baked into the payment flow.
The product is really one promise: a developer in Jakarta can do in an afternoon what used to take a bank-integration team a year.
// Why developers reach for itInfrastructure companies live or die on volume, and Xendit's volume moved fast. In a single year it tripled annualized transactions from 65 million to 200 million, and grew total payments value from $6.5 billion to $15 billion. Those aren't vanity metrics - they're the difference between a tool and a backbone.
A 3x jump in twelve months - the kind of chart that makes investors return your calls. Source: Series D disclosures, 2022.
The proof shows up in deals, too. Xendit invested in the Philippines' Dragonpay to deepen local rails, then in 2025 fully acquired Malaysia's Payex - a Bank Negara Malaysia-licensed gateway - rebranding it Xendit Malaysia after onboarding 4,500+ businesses and processing $1.1 billion locally. The backers reflect the same conviction: Y Combinator, Accel, Tiger Global, Coatue and Insight Partners.
You can't fake transaction volume. Either the money flows through you, or it doesn't.
// The only metric infrastructure can't gameXendit's stated mission is almost suspiciously plain: make payments simple. The ambition hides in the second clause. Making payments simple in San Francisco is solved. Making them simple across a region of fragmented banks, competing wallets and shifting regulation is the actual work - and it's the work Xendit signed up for.
The bigger vision is to be the financial backbone of emerging markets, full stop. Lo has pointed to Southeast Asia's digital economy crossing $360 billion - a number that only matters if the money underneath it can actually move. That's the gap Xendit exists to close.
Southeast Asia's digital economy will be worth more than US$360 billion. Someone has to build the rails it runs on.
// Moses Lo, Co-founder & CEOApps come and go. Rails compound. Every market Xendit enters - and in 2026 that list reaches toward Latin America, with Mexico and Colombia first - is a market where the next thousand businesses can plug into payments instead of building them. That's the quiet leverage of infrastructure: you grow when your customers grow, and your customers' customers never see your name.
So return to that food-delivery app in Jakarta, that wallet top-up in Manila, that freelancer payout in Kuala Lumpur. A decade ago, each of those would have meant a custom bank integration, a compliance headache, and a founder learning far more about payment regulation than they ever wanted to. Now it's a few lines of code. The friction that once ate someone's rent is, increasingly, just a callback returning 200 OK.
Xendit didn't make payments exciting. It did something better. It made them boring - and in payments, boring is the highest compliment there is.
Profile compiled from public sources. Figures are approximate and reflect the latest available reporting.