Startups Directory

Micro Connect is a fintech platform that creates Daily Revenue Contracts (DRCs) as a new asset class, enabling investors to provide capital to micro and small businesses in exchange for daily revenue sharing. The platform uses its proprietary Automated Repayment Mechanism (ARM) to securely capture revenue data and split cash flows in real-time, and the blockchain-enabled Authenticated Rights Market (Rights ARM) to facilitate transparent trading of DRC portfolios. As of December 2024, Micro Connect has funded over 13,000 businesses across 200 mainland Chinese cities, positioning itself as a blue ocean alternative to traditional Wall Street financing.

PayJoy provides buy-now-pay-later smartphone financing for underbanked populations in emerging markets, with loans typically spanning 3-12 months at no interest and no hidden fees. The company uses the smartphone itself as collateral and employs machine learning to assess creditworthiness, achieving 20% lower default rates than traditional lenders. PayJoy has served over 15 million customers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and recently expanded into credit products like the PayJoy Card to help customers build traditional credit scores.

Mercury is a modern online banking platform purpose-built for startups and technology-focused businesses. It eliminates friction in business banking by offering zero-fee checking and savings accounts, corporate cards, invoicing, bill pay, and spend management—all with a modern interface designed for founders. Unlike legacy banks that flag startup activity as suspicious, Mercury understands the funding and cash flow patterns of early-stage companies. The platform aggregates financial data across all accounts to provide real-time insights into company financial health.

Remote is a global Employer of Record (EOR) platform that enables companies to hire, manage, and pay employees across 70+ countries without establishing legal entities. The platform handles employment contracts, payroll, taxes, benefits, and compliance through in-house operations rather than third-party networks. Remote serves mid-market to enterprise companies looking to build distributed teams while avoiding costly subsidiary setup and contractor misclassification risks.

Rain is a full-stack fintech infrastructure platform that enables developers, fintechs, and financial services firms to embed stablecoin payments into their products through a unified API. The platform handles money-in, storage, spending, and money-out across multiple blockchains while managing complex back-end operations like tokenization, compliance, and settlement. Rain's proprietary settlement stack allows Visa card transactions to interoperate with stablecoins, making them practical for everyday purchases. The company pioneered the ability to settle Visa transactions using stablecoins seven days a week, reducing working capital requirements and enabling near-instant liquidity.

Genesis Global is a cloud-based low-code application development platform purpose-built for financial markets firms. It enables developers to build mission-critical, real-time applications 5x faster than traditional development with less code and lower cost, featuring event-driven architecture optimized for low-latency, high-throughput scenarios. The platform differentiates from generic low-code solutions by being specifically designed for the complexities of financial markets, replacing the traditional buy-vs-build challenge with a buy-to-build approach.

Pleo is a European spend management platform that issues smart corporate payment cards (physical and virtual) integrated with real-time expense tracking and accounting software. It automates the entire employee spending workflow—from card transactions to receipt capture to invoice management—while giving finance teams budget controls and fraud detection. Pleo serves 40,000+ small and medium-sized businesses across 14 European markets, positioning itself as the dominant player in a spend management category worth $80B+ globally.

Moniepoint is an all-in-one financial platform providing payment processing, digital banking, credit facilities, and business management tools for small and medium-sized businesses across Nigeria and expanding internationally. The company operates a network of payment terminals integrated with mobile banking apps, allowing merchants to accept payments, manage inventory, and access working capital loans underwritten by transaction data. With 1 billion+ monthly transactions and $22 billion in annual payment volume, Moniepoint has become Nigeria's largest agent banking player, serving 10 million businesses and individuals.

9fin is an AI-native intelligence platform that transforms complex financial data into structured, decision-ready insights for debt market professionals. It combines proprietary data from the world's largest team of private credit journalists with AI-powered workflows and human oversight to help credit teams identify deals, analyze risk, and monitor global debt markets in minutes instead of weeks. The platform serves over 300 leading banks, asset managers, law firms, and advisory firms globally, positioning itself as a modern alternative to legacy systems like Bloomberg and FactSet with a focus on debt markets and AI automation.

Xendit is a digital payment infrastructure platform enabling businesses across Southeast Asia to accept payments through 100+ payment methods including credit cards, e-wallets, bank transfers, and QR codes. The company solves the critical problem of low credit card penetration in emerging markets by offering virtual accounts and local payment integrations in a single API. Xendit processes payments, manages marketplaces, disburses payroll, and detects fraud for over 10,000 businesses. The platform generates revenue through transaction fees and has achieved unicorn status with $538M in total funding.

Ascend Money is a Southeast Asian fintech platform that provides digital financial services to the underbanked population across 7 ASEAN countries. The company operates TrueMoney, a 50-million-user e-wallet, alongside Ascend Nano (nano lending), digital savings, investment, and remittance services. Unlike traditional lenders, Ascend uses transaction data and behavioral patterns from its wallet to assess creditworthiness, enabling it to extend loans as small as $20 to customers rejected by banks. As Thailand's first fintech unicorn, Ascend serves 30 million active users and has become the region's largest digital financial services provider.

PayCargo is a cloud-based payment settlement platform that automates freight payments across air, sea, and land logistics. It connects shippers with over 4,000 vendors including major carriers like Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, and Air France, enabling cargo release within an hour of payment approval. The platform reduces processing costs and delays while offering integrated financing options for companies that prefer deferred payment.

Akur8 is an AI-powered SaaS platform that automates insurance pricing and reserving using machine learning while maintaining regulatory transparency. The platform enables actuaries to build predictive pricing models 5x faster than traditional methods by combining gradient-boosted machine learning accuracy with GLM-comparable explainability. Serving 300+ insurers including AXA, Generali, and Munich Re across 40+ countries, Akur8 solves the critical problem of reconciling advanced AI sophistication with insurance regulatory compliance requirements.

Spendesk is an all-in-one spend management platform that consolidates corporate cards, expense reimbursements, invoice payments, budgets, approvals, and reporting into a single solution. It serves mid-market and enterprise businesses across Europe, particularly SMBs, eliminating fragmented spending processes and giving finance teams visibility and automation across all employee spending. The platform processed €20 billion in spend in 2024 and is trusted by over 5,000 businesses including Algolia, Soundcloud, Doctolib, and Gousto. What differentiates Spendesk is its unified 7-in-1 approach versus point solutions, combined with European compliance focus and recent AI agent capabilities.

FundGuard is a cloud-native, AI-powered investment accounting platform that serves as a core system of record for asset managers and fund administrators. It automates complex multi-asset accounting workflows, real-time NAV monitoring, and exception management across multiple books of record (IBOR, ABOR, X-BOR). The platform uses machine learning to automatically map financial data from any format (CSV, Excel, XML, screenshots) and transform accounting from reactive to proactive, reducing operational risk and manual effort.

Codat is a universal API platform that enables software providers and financial institutions to access, synchronize, and interpret small business financial data in real-time. It connects to 35+ accounting, banking, and commerce platforms through a single standardized API, making integrations 6x faster than building in-house. The platform serves over 300 global clients including major banks and fintechs like Brex, Jeeves, and PayPal Zettle, with 150,000+ small businesses connected.

Fazz is a B2B neobank and payment infrastructure platform serving businesses across Southeast Asia, from warungs to Fortune 500 companies. The platform enables businesses to accept payments (e-wallet, bank transfer, credit card), maintain business cash accounts with 4% interest, access corporate cards, and utilize lending products like invoice financing. Fazz addresses the $300 billion funding gap for MSMEs by providing enterprise-grade financial tools at accessible price points, processing over $6 billion in annualized GTV.

BitGo is the largest independent digital asset custodian, securing approximately 20% of all on-chain Bitcoin transactions and holding over $100 billion in digital assets. The company provides a full-stack platform combining multisignature wallet technology, regulated custody, and prime brokerage services for institutions including banks, fintechs, hedge funds, and asset managers. BitGo pioneered multi-sig architecture that eliminates single points of failure, differentiating it from competitors by providing insurance-grade security with clear legal title to custodied assets.

Unit is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that enables companies to embed financial features—checking accounts, cards, payments, and lending—directly into their products via APIs, SDKs, and white-labeled UIs. The platform reduces what typically takes 18 months of bank negotiations and compliance work into a 5-week deployment. Unit differentiates by owning its own ledger, the most critical and sensitive part of the ecosystem, delivering superior technical control and user experience compared to competitors.

MFS Africa is Africa's largest mobile money interoperability hub, connecting over 400 million mobile wallets and millions of bank accounts across 40+ countries through a single API. The platform enables enterprises—from fintech companies to NGOs—to scale digital payment strategies by providing seamless cross-border transfers, merchant payments, bulk payouts, and bank-to-wallet services. With partnerships spanning 180+ mobile money operators and global remittance providers like Western Union and MoneyGram, MFS Africa has become the infrastructure backbone for digital payments across the continent.

Sure is an API-driven infrastructure platform that enables businesses to embed insurance products directly into their customer experiences in milliseconds. The company provides policy management, claims settlement, and quoting infrastructure that allows brands and carriers to launch digital insurance programs without building from scratch. Sure serves enterprises like Tesla, MasterCard, Intuit, and Carvana, differentiating through fully embedded end-to-end experiences built from the ground up rather than rebranded legacy solutions.