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Thu Huong Le · · 6 min readAspire’s fintech solutions have earned SMEs’ trust. Now comes a loyalty test
In November 2023, Aspire officially opened its headquarters in Singapore, committing to double its local headcount to 300 by 2025.
This came several months after the six-year-old fintech startup secured US$100 million in series C funding in one of the biggest rounds for digibanks in 2023, according to a previous Tech in Asia analysis.
Co-founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli, however, disagrees with labeling his company a “digibank.” “We are not a bank ourselves,” he says in an interview with Tech in Asia. “We are an operating system for business finance.”
Enterprise Singapore chair Peter Ong (middle) and Aspire’s management team at the opening of the Aspire headquarters in Singapore last November / Photo credit: Aspire
What does that mean exactly? “If you’re a small company, you want to collect money, pay employees, pay vendors, handle remittance, track your cash flows,” explains fintech expert Varun Mittal, who invested in Aspire as an angel investor.
Aspire says it enables customers to do all financial management tasks in a single dashboard, offering them competitive foreign exchange rates and streamlined corporate card access.
The company now serves 15,000 businesses across the region, with clients like Endowus, Love Bonito, and NextBillion.ai. (Full disclosure: Tech in Asia is also a client.)
But having secured US$300 million in funding since its inception, Aspire needs to prove it can become a regional household name like Carousell or ShopBack and move beyond its Singapore base.
It’ll also need to show that it isn’t just a niche provider for small businesses, who may find alternatives provided by banks more attractive as they grow.
No branches but different
Baronchelli is part of the Lazada mafia, a network of former Lazada executives-turned-entrepreneurs. This explains the company’s initial focus on offering quick loans to online sellers.
However, Aspire has since moved away from lending to building financial management tools that handle payments and expenses. Financing is now positioned as an add-on service, according to CEO Baronchelli.
The fintech firm mostly targets SMEs, especially fast-growing digital companies that find banks’ processes cumbersome.
“SMEs represent a very niche and underserved segment of the market,” says Zennon Kapron, founder of fintech consulting firm Kapronasia. “Traditional banks serve SMEs as they do typically with most retail clients – not a lot of products and services and little personal attention.”
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After raising US$300 million, Aspire needs to prove that serving the finance management needs of SMEs could propel it into a regional tech powerhouse.
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