Southern leads $31.5m round for fintech player Soft Space

Other participants include Transcosmos, a Japanese investor that has a string of digital marketing, e-commerce, and business process outsourcing assets, Tokyo-based credit card company JCB, and Hibiscus Fund, a venture capital vehicle managed by RHL Ventures and South Korea’s KB Investment.

Transcosmos provided USD 5m in Series A funding in 2017. A year later, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group-owned Sumitomo Mitsui Card led a Series B round of undisclosed size. JCB joined the cap table in 2022 with a USD 5m investment and a licensing agreement that allowed Soft Space to issue JCB cards. RHL and Transcosmos also contributed capital, with the latter taking its holding to 30%.

Founded in 2012, Soft Space aims to simplify financial infrastructure and enable frictionless payments. It offers a secure payments platform that can be deployed across third-party websites – typically those operated by financial institutions – through application program interfaces (APIs). The system is designed to be modular, so clients can pick different modules to suit their needs.

Additional value-added services include customer relationship management solutions, rewards and loyalty programmes underpinned by machine learning, and training. The company also provides handheld devices that read credit cards, generate receipts, and facilitate auto settlement, own-brand and white-label digital wallets, and electronic data capture and digitalisation services.

Malaysia-headquartered Soft Space claims to have doubled revenue in the past two years, building up a customer base comprising more than 70 financial institutions and other partners in Japan, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. The new capital will support continued growth and expansion, according to a statement.

“Soft Space has proven itself in the highly competitive payments sector and has led the way with a number of firsts in the industry, a credit to its market credibility and maturity of its technology solutions,” said Wong Chin Toh, a managing director at Southern (pictured, left, with Soft Space CTO Nicholas Lim, Kenneth Tan, a managing partner at Southern, and Soft Space CEO Joel Tay).

The private equity firm, which operates out of offices in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, focuses on control buyouts and growth capital investments in companies with enterprise values in the USD 20m to USD 200m range. Recent activity includes leading a USD 45m round for Singapore’s Rainforest, an aggregator of Amazon marketplace sellers.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Financials
• Expansion
• Technology
• Malaysia
• Southern Capital
• Growth capital
• Fintech