Money questions are awkward to ask out loud, and that is where Seedly found its footing. The Singapore app began as a personal finance service for millennials and young people across Southeast Asia, and it let them track spending and ask strangers what to do with their first salary.
The company started around 2016, when it took seed money from East Ventures and NUS Enterprise. It also came out of the second batch of DBS's HotSpot pre-accelerator, a programme run by the country's largest bank for very early teams. A bank that was happy to nurture a startup that would explain budgeting to its future customers says something about how seriously Singapore took young people's financial literacy.
The whole team moved across, and Seedly kept operating as a business under ShopBack.
The public record on the people is thin. Tee-Ming Chew is named as co-founder and CTO, and Ming Feng Yeap held a marketing role. Beyond that, the founders' schools, childhoods and early jobs are not clearly documented in what we could read, and rather than guess, this profile sticks to what can be checked.
What is clear is the arc. In May 2018, Seedly became the first acquisition by ShopBack, the e-commerce cashback company that was already among the best known startups in Southeast Asia. The terms were not disclosed. The whole team moved across, and Seedly kept operating as a business under ShopBack. It was an exit for the founders, their team and the investors, about two years after the company began.
Then the app changed hands again. In October 2020, CompareAsiaGroup, a financial comparison company based in Singapore and Hong Kong, bought Seedly from ShopBack, with plans to expand the community beyond Singapore. The product that began as a student project had been through two corporate owners in under three years.
There is a quiet lesson in that for anyone building a free community product. The audience is the asset, and big companies buy audiences. Seedly's founders did not wait for a perfect business model. They built something that young people actually used, got into a bank's accelerator, and sold to a buyer who needed trust with a younger crowd. The harder question, which the next owner faced, was how to earn money from people who came for free advice.