YouTrip raises $30 million in Series A funding

The funds will be used to ramp up the company’s technological capabilities to widen its suite of payment products and expand in Southeast Asia

Singapore-based YouTrip, an online bank that focuses on making multi-currency transactions less costly and more efficient, announced today that it has raised a $30 million Series A. YouTrip founder and CEO Caecilia Chu said the round was led by prominent family offices in Asia who prefer to remain unnamed, but are returning from earlier rounds.

The Series A brings YouTrip’s total funding to more than $60 million. The company says it has now processed over $800 million in card spend globally, with almost 20 million transactions and over 1.5 million app downloads.

The funds will be used to ramp up the company’s technological capabilities to widen its suite of payment products and expand in Southeast Asia.

The company is rapidly expanding its team in Singapore to fast-track product development. YouTrip, which in September announced it was setting up an innovation lab in Singapore, plans to recruit more than 50 new roles across engineering, product development, marketing, and other business functions. This will boost the headcount to about 150 in the next few months.

Over the next year, YouTrip also plans to focus on geographical expansion. Currently operational in Singapore and Thailand, it has partnered with Visa to expand into the Philippines and Malaysia. Chu added that the company is also in late-stage discussions with partners to launch in Indonesia and Vietnam.

The company says its transaction volume has now returned to pre-pandemic levels. Since it anticipates more traction as consumer spending and travel increases, YouTrip plans to introduce a brand makeover for its consumer app in early 2022, along with new payment features.

We believe there is untapped potential in cross-border payments, and our market-leading position in this space puts us in a good place to serve more of our users’ payment needs — from travellers to online shoppers, and now, businesses, Chu said.

While the pandemic temporarily closed the door on travel, it also opened up new opportunities in the e-commerce and business-to-business (B2B) payments space, according to Chu.

YouBiz, its corporate card, is also slated for launch in early 2022. Chu says one of the reasons the company entered the B2B space was because more SMBs are adopting fintech services.

We know how important it is to be a truly pandemic-resilient company, she added. We promised ourselves that we would no longer read the news every day to see when the borders would reopen. We would make it work and continue to make it work regardless of new travel measures.