In its first month, Funding Societies received about S$3 million in loan applications. It lent out roughly S$250,000. The gap says almost everything about the business: demand was never the problem. Trust was.
The founders, Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya, were Harvard Business School students when they started in February 2015. Reports later described the company being launched in about 100 days while the two were still finishing their MBAs. An early account says they put in around US$400,000 of their own money alongside about US$1.2 million from backers. Little is public about where either grew up.
That year it launched in Indonesia as Modalku and became one of six licensed SME lending platforms in Malaysia.
Their bet was simple to state and hard to do. Small businesses in Southeast Asia could not get bank loans, and people who wanted a return had few places to put their money. A platform could match the two, as long as it picked borrowers well. The first month showed how picky it had to be: for every dollar disbursed, about twelve dollars of applications did not become loans.
What helped was borrowed credibility. In April 2016 DBS Bank partnered with the platform. That year it launched in Indonesia as Modalku and became one of six licensed SME lending platforms in Malaysia. Sequoia India and Alpha JWC led a S$10 million Series A in August 2016, and SoftBank Ventures Korea led a US$25 million Series B in April 2018.
The company kept adding countries and partners. It teamed up with Razer Fintech on merchant financing in 2020 and entered Thailand in February 2021. A larger Series C, reported at US$144 million with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 involved, followed, and Maybank invested in 2024. The platform says it has disbursed more than US$2.6 billion to small businesses in over 5.1 million transactions, though that figure is the company's own.
The cost of this kind of lending is risk. Every country has its own regulator, its own credit-data gaps and its own repayment culture, and a lender to small firms takes the first hit when they struggle. Funding Societies operates as a licensed platform rather than a bank, which shapes what it can do alone.
The lesson sits in that first month. A founder who sees S$3 million of demand and S$250,000 of supply should not panic. The ratio is the product.