Endowus, a leading investment platform, has announced its first round of external fund-raising of $23 million for an undisclosed stake.
The investors are Lightspeed Venture Partners, a leading global venture capital firm, as well as SoftBank Ventures Asia, the early-stage venture arm of Softbank.
“Endowus will use the additional resources and the support of our VC partners to go deeper and broader in the Asia market where we want to continue helping all investors achieve their investment goals," says Samuel Rhee, founding partner and chairman of Endowus.
Hong Kong will be the first target market outside Singapore, with others to follow.
Thus far, Endowus has been fully funded by its employees, who collectively hail from the likes of from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Blackstone, Bytedance, Grab, Dropbox, Alibaba, and Lazada.
The company has been on a rapid growth trajectory, as it maintains a very consistent proposition of offering expert personalised advice, along with access to best-in-class funds at a lower cost with no sales fees and 100% trailer fee rebates.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic last year, Endowus has grown its assets under advice by eight times, and the number of clients up by 20 times.
Endowus is on track to hit $1 billion in assets under advice by Q2 2021 in Singapore alone, just over 18 months after its full-service launch.
“The success we’ve seen in Singapore this past year proves that our solutions are meeting the needs of investors, with one in two clients acquired on our platform investing across multiple wealth streams,” says Gregory Van, founding partner and CEO of Endowus.
Harsha Kumar, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, identifies with Endowus’ mission to solve saving and investing for individual investors and meet global retirement challenges.
“Their innovative business model, ambition, and commitment to a higher standard of fiduciary duty speaks of a team that is at the cutting edge of the FinTech space,” he says.
“As the first-and-only CPF digital advisor, Endowus is clearly the leader in digital wealth, has a differentiated business model, and the strongest team in the WealthTech space in the region,” says Cindy Jin, Partner of SoftBank Ventures Asia.
“Softbank Ventures Asia is looking forward to being an important partner of the future success of Endowus, in Singapore and the rest of Asia,” she adds.
