ENDOWUS

Samuel Rhee had already run the show as CEO and chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley Investment Management in Asia. He had seen exactly how the wealth industry made its money.

Hidden trailer fees. Products sold because they paid the bank, not because they were good for you.

In 2017 he teamed up with Gregory Van and You Ning Sun to build the opposite. Endowus would be fee-only, take no kickbacks, and act in the client's interest first.

Then they cracked the thing nobody else had. Letting people invest their government CPF retirement savings.

Here is the clever part. When you buy a fund, the fund manager normally pays a chunk of your fees to whoever sold it to you.

That is called a trailer fee. Endowus refuses to keep that money.

It rebates it straight back to you. Instead, it charges one transparent access fee on the money it manages.

So the platform only makes money if you pay it directly, not through hidden commissions. It builds you a portfolio of low-cost institutional funds, then manages and rebalances it.

Cash, CPF, SRS, all in one place.

The core is the digital wealth platform that builds and manages diversified fund portfolios. Its standout feature is CPF and SRS investing, letting Singaporeans put government retirement savings into low-cost global funds.

Endowus Cash Smart is a cash management product for idle money. It also offers a Fund Smart menu where investors can pick individual institutional funds at rebated fees, plus access to private market funds for wealthier clients.

Endowus won by being the only serious way to invest CPF and SRS money properly. That is a captive, huge pool of savings every working Singaporean has.

Once people trusted it with their retirement money, moving their cash investments over was easy. It also built credibility by partnering with giant fund managers like PIMCO and Dimensional to offer institutional funds to regular people.

Then it expanded into Hong Kong to chase the wider Asian wealth market. Trust first, then scale.

Endowus is fighting on price in a business where price is thin. Giving trailer fees back to clients is great for users but it means less revenue per dollar than rivals who pocket them.

To make that model work, it has to keep piling on assets and keep costs low. It also faces well-funded competitors like Syfe and the big banks, all chasing the same Asian savers.

And expanding into new markets like Hong Kong means winning trust all over again from scratch.

Endowus was self-funded for its first two years, which is rare and tells you the founders had conviction. Then the money came.

A roughly $67 million round brought in SoftBank, Prosus Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and UBS. Later, global banks UBS, MUFG and Citi Ventures put in another $35 million.

In 2025 it closed a $70 million round led by Illuminate Financial, pushing total funding past $130 million. Even former NBA player Jeremy Lin's fund joined in.