XENDIT

Moses Lo grew up in Australia, studied at UC Berkeley, and went to work in Silicon Valley. He could have stayed.

Instead, he moved to Indonesia in 2015 with co-founders Juan Gonzalez, Tessa Wijaya, and Bo Chen because he noticed something that most Western tech investors were ignoring: Southeast Asia had hundreds of millions of people coming online for the first time, and the payment infrastructure to serve them was an absolute mess.

The original idea wasn't even payments. Xendit started as a remittance product — trying to make it easier to send money across Southeast Asia.

That didn't work. What they kept hearing from businesses was a different problem entirely: just accepting a payment online is a nightmare.

Every bank has its own API. Every e-wallet is separate.

Virtual accounts, convenience store payments, credit cards — none of it talked to each other. If you wanted to collect money from Indonesian customers, you needed integrations with dozens of systems, and building them all yourself could take years.

So Xendit pivoted. They built the single integration that connected everything.

You plug in once, and suddenly you can accept payments from every major bank, every popular e-wallet, and every alternative method that matters in each market. That pivot happened early enough that it didn't cost them everything — and it turned out to be exactly the right call.

They went through Y Combinator in 2015, which gave them the credibility to raise early capital and the network to think bigger than just Indonesia. From the start, the ambition was always regional — Indonesia first, then the Philippines, then wherever the payments problem was messiest.

Xendit is a payment infrastructure company. Businesses plug in to Xendit's API once and instantly get the ability to accept payments from hundreds of sources across Southeast Asia — bank transfers, e-wallets like GoPay and OVO, virtual accounts, credit cards, convenience store cash payments, QR codes, and more.

They also handle payouts, which is the reverse: sending money out to vendors, employees, or customers at scale.

The way they make money is simple: a small fee on every transaction. It's the classic toll road model.

Every payment that flows through their pipes earns them a cut. Because Southeast Asia's e-commerce and digital economy is growing fast, the volume keeps going up — and so does Xendit's revenue without needing to reinvent anything.

They also offer additional products layered on top of the core payments infrastructure: invoicing tools, subscription billing, payment links that businesses can send directly to customers without needing a full checkout page, and fraud detection. These add-ons make the core product stickier — once a business has built their entire billing system inside Xendit, switching to a competitor is painful.

Their customers range from massive Indonesian e-commerce platforms to small businesses selling through Instagram. The API is developer-friendly enough that a startup can be up and running in days, but enterprise-grade enough that large companies trust it with millions of transactions.

That range is deliberate — they want volume from everywhere.

Xendit's core product is its payment gateway API — the single integration that lets businesses in Southeast Asia accept payments from virtually every method their customers use. Bank transfers, virtual accounts, e-wallets, credit cards, QR codes, convenience store payments — it's all there, and it works.

For developers, the documentation is clean and the integration is fast. That's rarer in Southeast Asia than it sounds.

Xendit also offers a robust payout product, which handles mass disbursements. If you need to pay 10,000 vendors, freelancers, or delivery drivers in Indonesia simultaneously, Xendit's payout API does that.

This is a genuinely hard problem to solve at scale in a market with fragmented banking infrastructure, and it's a key reason larger enterprise customers stick around.

Payment Links is the product that brought small businesses onto the platform. Instead of building a full checkout page, you generate a link, send it to a customer on WhatsApp, and they pay.

It's how millions of Instagram and social commerce sellers in Southeast Asia actually collect money. Simple idea, enormous addressable market.

Invoicing, subscription billing, and fraud detection round out the product suite. None of these are flashy, but together they mean a business can run its entire revenue collection operation through Xendit without touching anything else.

That's the stickiness play — and it's working.

The counterintuitive move Xendit made was deciding not to compete with banks. Most fintech startups in emerging markets try to disrupt the incumbents.

Xendit went the other direction: they partnered with them. By integrating directly with every major bank in Indonesia and the Philippines, Xendit became infrastructure that banks and businesses both needed.

That's a much harder position to attack than being another challenger bank.

The second smart move was going deep on Indonesia before going wide across the region. Indonesia alone has 270 million people, over 100 million of whom are unbanked or underbanked, and a digital economy that grew explosively during COVID.

Xendit dominated the market there before expanding into the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia. By the time competitors noticed the opportunity, Xendit had years of integrations, relationships, and trust that couldn't be replicated quickly.

The Y Combinator stamp opened doors, but what kept customers was product reliability. In a region where payment failures are routine, Xendit built a reputation for uptime and customer support that was genuinely better than alternatives.

In fintech, especially in payments, boring reliability is the most powerful growth strategy there is. Companies don't switch payment processors when things work.

Xendit made sure things worked.

The honest challenge for Xendit is that payments is a commoditized business at its core. The moat is integration depth and switching costs — but both of those can be replicated by a well-funded competitor with enough time.

Stripe has been slowly expanding into Southeast Asia. Grab, which already has tens of millions of users across the region, has its own payments infrastructure.

Gojek, Xendit's neighbor in Jakarta, runs one of the most widely used e-wallets in Indonesia. Xendit is fighting for the B2B infrastructure layer while sitting next to consumer platforms that are also quietly building payments products.

Regulatory complexity is the other permanent headache. Southeast Asia isn't one market — it's ten completely different regulatory environments.

What's allowed in Indonesia isn't necessarily allowed in the Philippines or Vietnam. Every country requires separate licenses, separate banking relationships, and separate compliance teams.

That's expensive and slow, and it limits how fast Xendit can expand.

The 2022 and 2023 tech downturn also hit them. Xendit laid off around 5% of its workforce in late 2022, citing a more difficult fundraising environment and the need to extend runway.

That's not a death sentence, but it's a reminder that being a unicorn doesn't mean you're immune to the same pressures everyone else is feeling.

Xendit's most significant backing came from Coatue Management, which led its $150 million Series C in 2021 — the round that pushed Xendit's valuation to $1 billion and made it Indonesia's first payments unicorn. That round also included Insight Partners, which added weight on the enterprise side, and Tiger Global, which was deploying aggressively into Southeast Asian fintech at the time.

The earlier backing from Accel and Y Combinator were foundational. Y Combinator gave Xendit its Silicon Valley credibility and network in 2015 when the company was still finding its direction.

Accel's investment gave them the institutional firepower to hire aggressively and build out the team before revenue justified it. That early support from recognizable Western VC names made it easier to win enterprise customers who needed reassurance that the infrastructure provider powering their business wasn't going to disappear.

PayPal Ventures also participated in later rounds, which carried strategic weight beyond just capital. Having PayPal's venture arm on the cap table signaled that the global payments establishment saw Xendit as a legitimate player in the region — not just a local startup.

For enterprise customers and banking partners evaluating whether to integrate with Xendit, that association mattered.