Singapore's Advance.AI gets $80m Series C

Unicorn Venture, eGarden Ventures, Vision Plus Capital and GSR Ventures also participated. Advance.AI’s CEO, Jeffrey Chen, is a partner at GSR and formerly an investor at US-headquartered Farallon Capital. Farallon contributed to a $50 million Series B last year that also included Vision Plus, GSR, ZhenFund, Alpha Startups, Northstar Group, and Provident Capital. 

Chen co-founded Advance.AI in 2016 alongside Dong Shou, co-founder of Chinese fintech player Wecash, with a view to enhancing credit assessment, anti-fraud, and risk control systems for corporate clients through AI and big data-related technologies. Target clients include financial institutions, telecom operators, internet companies and online finance businesses.

Advance.AI’s core product is a fraud detection and credit scoring tool known as Guardian, that verifies a person’s identity, employment data and credit history on submission of a loan application. Additional offerings focus variously on data collection and evaluation services, facial recognition, and targeted marketing. Growth opportunities have been identified in underbanked markets of Southeast Asia.

The company is said to have more than 300 enterprise customers in financial and consumer-related industries across Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and India. Localization, including a focus on supporting customers’ market-specific challenges, has been a key differentiation strategy. In addition to Singapore, offices have been set up in Beijing, Jakarta, and Manila.

Shou, who is Advance.AI’s COO, has also flagged the expansion opportunity in China, where his former company Wecash has recently raised $160 million to deepen AI abilities and expand its consumer financial services portfolio. Other regional competitors include Beijing-based MiningLamp, which raised about $300 million in March for expansions across Greater China and Europe. 

Gaorong, previously known as Banyan Capital, closed its fourth US dollar fund at $500 million in December. Pavilion is a private equity arm of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings that focuses on North Asia and China. Temasek is an investor in MiningLamp.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Expansion
• Financials
• Technology
• Singapore
• Banyan Capital
• Temasek Holdings
• Vision Plus Capital
• GSR Ventures
• artificial intelligence
• Financial Services