Long before Jefferson Chen ran a Singapore fintech valued near US$2 billion, he started a nonprofit. At Tsinghua University he founded Technology & Education: Connecting Cultures, known as TECC, a student group built around bringing technology and education across borders. It later earned him the UN's Fritz Redlich Alumni Award, and he is described as its youngest recipient.
Chen studied computer science at Tsinghua and graduated with first-class honors. That detail matters, because the company he would build was about teaching machines to judge people.
So Chen arrived at founding as an investor who had watched many companies from the outside.
His next move was across the Pacific. He went to Stanford for an MBA and co-founded its Chinese Entrepreneur Organization. Then came money: Goldman Sachs, where he worked on IPOs and mergers for Asian companies, and Farallon Capital, where he headed private investing for Greater China at a firm managing about US$30 billion. Later he became a partner at GSR Ventures, which is also an investor in his company.
So Chen arrived at founding as an investor who had watched many companies from the outside. In 2016, by most profiles, he started Advance Intelligence Group in Singapore. It grew into three units. ADVANCE.AI sells identity verification and risk tools to businesses. Atome offers buy-now-pay-later to shoppers. Ginee helps online sellers run their shops.
The backers read like a Who's Who of Asian growth money: Warburg Pincus, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Northstar Capital, Pavilion Capital. Reported funding runs from more than US$500 million to US$616 million. In 2019 it was valued around US$400 million; by 2023 above US$2 billion. The group says it works across more than fifteen countries.
The trade-offs of this story are what the public record does not show: the early hard months, who said no, what it cost. Chen has given few interviews, and the sources are thin on that side.
What the record does show is a founder whose habits repeat. At Tsinghua he made a group to link technology and education; at Stanford a group for fellow entrepreneurs; in Singapore a company built on data and credit. He keeps building the institution first, then the product. For a first-time founder, that is a quiet kind of lesson: collect your people early.