In 2011, the only way to buy digital content online in much of Asia was a credit card. Most people did not have one. That was the starting point of Coda, which says it began that year in Indonesia.
Two names appear in the company's own telling of its origin: Neil Davidson and Paul Leishman. Little else is public about where they came from or how they met. One directory also lists Bobby Choi as a third founder. What is clear is the problem they picked. Game publishers wanted Southeast Asian players, and those players wanted to pay with what they actually had: mobile airtime, convenience-store vouchers, bank transfers, e-wallets.
A very large Series C figure is quoted in one database, but it conflicts with other records and should be treated with care.
So Coda built a patchwork. Each country meant a new set of local payment methods, a new partner and a new regulator. It was dull work that big payment companies largely skipped, which is why it became valuable. A publisher could plug in one integration and reach players across many markets.
The company raised a Series A in 2013, and in 2016 TechCrunch reported a round of about US$2 million, around the time Codapay added bitcoin processing for merchants in the region. In 2022 it took an investment from Apis Partners. A very large Series C figure is quoted in one database, but it conflicts with other records and should be treated with care.
The turn was the app-store squeeze. As publishers grew tired of the fees charged by Apple and Google, Coda pushed toward out-of-app purchases: web stores, purchase links and direct payments that let a studio keep more of each sale. The company now describes itself as an out-of-app monetisation and commerce company, working with more than 300 publishers across over 70 markets.
In February 2023 Shane Happach was named chief executive, and Davidson moved to executive chairman. In 2025 Coda bought Recharge, a European prepaid payments platform. It says it now has 400-plus payment channels, more than 120 million active users and over 600 staff in 20-plus locations. Those are the company's own figures.
Coda's story is not one dramatic night. It is a founder pair who stayed on one unfashionable problem for more than a decade, until the world's biggest platforms started to look like the problem too.