Xendit did not start as a payments infrastructure company. It started as a Bitcoin remittance idea, and it was one of the first Southeast Asian startups to be accepted into Y Combinator in 2015.
Inside YC the team changed course. Bitcoin was not the product that would work in Indonesia, so they turned to something familiar from the US: a peer-to-peer payments app in the spirit of Venmo. Friends would send money to friends, simply and for free.
So the founders, Moses Lo and Tessa Wijaya, did the unglamorous thing.
It stalled, and the reason is the interesting part. The app could take money in, but there was no way to send money out at scale, around the clock, to any bank account in Indonesia. Banks closed their rails at night and on weekends. A consumer app cannot promise instant payment on top of plumbing that sleeps.
So the founders, Moses Lo and Tessa Wijaya, did the unglamorous thing. Rather than keep tuning an app, they built the pipes themselves, negotiating directly with banks. In 2016, after a mini hackathon, they released APIs that let other businesses use that infrastructure. The customer changed from a person sending money to a developer who needed to collect and disburse it.
That shift made everything else possible. One product, the virtual account, gave each payer a unique identifier, which let merchants reconcile who had paid what without a finance clerk matching transfers by hand. For online shops, marketplaces and, later, other startups, this was the thing they had been missing.
The money arrived once the pattern was clear. Kleiner Perkins led the Series A. Accel led a US$64.6 million Series B. Tiger Global led a US$150 million Series C around September 2021 at a billion-dollar valuation, and in May 2022 Coatue and Insight Partners co-led a US$300 million Series D, taking total equity raised to about US$538 million. Xendit opened in the Philippines in 2020, its second market, and projected US$15 billion in payment volume for 2022, up from US$6.5 billion the year before.
The record is thin on the founders' private lives; what the sources do show is a company that was willing to abandon two ideas in its first year. First the Bitcoin remittance, then the consumer app. Neither failure was fatal because the learning was cheap and early.
The lesson for a first-time founder is that the real product is often the problem the first product ran into. Xendit's customers were not the people it first pictured. They were the ones who hit the same wall.