Singapore Digital Advice/Self-Directed Trading Raise

Another big funding round from the East for a digital advice/self-directed trading platform. Syfe raised a $53million Series C round lead by two UK family offices who are apparently bashful and were not named. Existing investors Unbound and Valar (Peter Theil) also participated.

Syfe is a direct-to-consumer digital advice and investing platform serving the mass affluent market, which they define as slightly lower than the way we think about mass affluent in the US. They operate mainly in Singapore, but also Hong Kong and have recently expanded into Australia with the acquisition of Selfwealth last month. They now stand at $10 billion AUM, up 50% from last year, which helps underscore the size of the unserved market in places like Singapore and India in particular.

We should probably point out that most people are reporting it as an $80 million raise, but that includes $27 million raised last summer, which we count as a different financing, if that matters. This brings the total amount raised to about $132 million.

We continue to see the D2C digital advice business booming in India in particular but Singapore as well. The fact of the matter is that the mass affluent class is growing rapidly in those markets and there are basically zero human advisors. It takes a while for a strong personal advice industry to come online, so in the interim it will have to be solved with technology.