Coda Payments, a Singapore-based fintech startup, recently announced that it had successfully closed an Apis Partners-led funding round of US$20 million on Tuesday. As well, Toivo Annus – an angel investor that has backed Coda Payments – and Apis Partners, a financial services-focused private equity asset management company based in London, obtained shares from a number of the startup’s seed investors as part of the deal. The investment and support by Apis Partners in the payment solutions provider will help the startup to better fulfill customer needs by broadening the company’s range of products and to further their reach and expansion in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Neil Davidson, Coda Payments’ executive chairman, said that the investment by Apis Partners represents the private equity firm’s trust and faith in the progress made by the startup and its future potential to perform even better, while the startup’s chief executive officer Philippe Limes commented that they are pleased to have joined forces with Apis Partners, whose insight and vast knowledge of emerging markets’ payments ecosystem will prove to be an indispensable asset as the fintech startup seeks to extend its presence to more locations worldwide.
Matteo Stefanel, co-founder of Apis Partners and managing partner at the firm, said that the investment in Coda Payments represents the second investment by its Apis Growth Fund II, and is complementary of the company’s proficiency in the payments sector.
Founded by Neil Davidson, Paul Leishman and Bobby Choi in 2011, Coda Payments is a payment processing solutions provider with a focus on emerging markets that provides digital content providers access to payment channels that enable consumers to make payments even if they do not possess a debit card or credit card. The startup’s list of clients include streaming service giant Netflix, Singapore-based gaming and e-commerce titan Garena, and Chinese gaming behemoth Tencent, and Coda Payments’ strong presence in Southeast Asia has helped these tech giants to extend their reach and presence to the less affluent countries in the region such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
One of the tech startup’s defining features is Codapay, a payment processing platform that boasts more than 100 payment methods that enable companies and businesses to collect payments from their customers in an efficient, easy-to-use manner in many of the world’s emerging markets. Codapay handles more than a million transactions daily, and it has maintained an impressive uptime of 99.9% throughout its years of being in operation. The startup also claims to have innovated a ‘web top-up model’ via its app Codashop, which enables businesses and companies to access a wide variety of locally-preferred payment channels via a simple API integration of its app. According to Coda Payments, the app is accessed more than 40 million times a month by customers keen on purchasing interesting digital content.
Apis Partners is a private equity asset management firm founded by Matteo Stefanel and Udayan Goyal with a focus on growth markets. Earlier this year the firm announced that they would be allocating 60% of its capital into financial services companies and startups in the emerging markets of Southeast Asia and South Asia, with the remaining 40% going to the growth markets of Africa. The firm’s first foray into Southeast Asia saw the company investing US$21 million in GHL Systems, a Malaysian payments system company.
The investment and support of Apis Partners in Coda Payments will enable the Singapore-based fintech startup to leverage the private equity firm’s expertise and knowledge of the payments ecosystem of emerging and growth markets to gain a better understanding of developing and diversifying their product range so as to better serve their customers. This partnership will only bring fruitful results for the digital content consumers of Southeast Asia as more and more payment channels are made available to them for making their purchases.
