When Caecilia Chu was five, her father tried to borrow money to start a business. It was hard for him to get the loan. She has remembered it, and it shaped what she built decades later.
She grew up in public housing in Hong Kong. Her father was a postman and her mother a kindergarten teacher. Money was not abundant, but scholarships took her to top American universities, including the Wharton School, and later an MBA at Harvard Business School. She worked at McKinsey, Citi and two Chinese fintech firms. On paper it was a strong climb.
That is an unusual start for a fintech with no large marketing machine.
In 2017 she left the corporate track. With her schoolmate Arthur Mak, she started YouTrip in Singapore. It began as a two-person operation. What they wanted to fix was an everyday irritation: foreign exchange fees and opaque conversion rates paid by anyone who travels. A product built around a multi-currency wallet and card could beat the banks on price.
The launch answered the question quickly. Within 48 hours of going live, YouTrip had 20,000 users. That is an unusual start for a fintech with no large marketing machine. Investors followed: a pre-Series A in 2019 led by Insignia Ventures Partners, US$30 million in Series A in 2021, and a US$50 million Series B in October 2023 led by Lightspeed.
Earning came from merchant fees of 1 to 3 percent on overseas and international purchases, plus interest on user balances. In 2022 YouTrip recorded its first net profit and launched YouBiz for small businesses, which onboarded over 3,000 local SMEs in its first year. It stayed profitable in 2023 and 2024.
The cost of this path is mostly hidden. The sources do not describe the personal price of the early years, and we will not invent it. We know that the founders kept the Series B money untouched into 2025, planning a Series C to hold a cash buffer, and that Chu said an IPO could be a few years away.
By mid-2025 YouTrip had about 250 people and processed about US$10 billion a year in transactions, eight years after Chu left her job.
For first-time founders, the lesson sits in the five-year-old memory. Chu did not start with a market map. She started with something she had watched a parent struggle with, and picked a product that removed that struggle for strangers.