Vinod Nair founded MoneySmart in Singapore around 2009, after building a real estate search engine. Finding money for the new company was hard, and the seed round of S$589,000 came in 2011 from Golden Gate Ventures and the National Research Foundation.
The site started with mortgage comparison and added credit cards and other products. It fed traffic with plain-language finance content.
In 2014 MoneySmart entered Indonesia by acquiring KreditAja. In October 2015 it closed a Series A of about $1.96 million led by SPH Media Fund. It then drew about 750,000 monthly visits in Singapore and 650,000 in Indonesia.
In 2017 MoneySmart raised a S$14 million Series B led by Kakaku.com. Total funding by then was roughly S$20 million.