Jia, a startup building a financial operating system for small businesses in Southeast Asia, has raised $3 million in funding, it tells This Week in Fintech exclusively.
Coinbase Ventures led the round, which included participation from Stellar Development Foundation and A100x as well as existing backers TCG and Hashed Emergent. The financing brings Jia’s total raised since its 2022 inception to $7.3 million.
Founded by Zach Marks and Cheng Cheng, alumni of financial inclusion pioneer Tala, the startup aims to resolve a systemic credit crunch in Southeast Asia by replacing “predatory” local lenders with institutional-grade capital, driven by a proprietary artificial intelligence engine.
"Think of modern financial infrastructure platforms like Brex or Mercury, but purpose-built for small businesses in emerging markets that have historically been locked out of the traditional banking system," Jia CEO Zach Marks told This Week in Fintech.
Currently focusing its operations in the Philippines (where it has dual headquarters along with Los Angeles), Jia offers what it describes as a unified ecosystem comprising invoice financing – which it claims can turn unpaid invoices into cash in as little as 30 minutes – supply chain financing for inventory and payroll, and operational business accounts.
Flipping the Underwriting Equation
The structural gap facing small businesses in developing economies is severe. In the Philippines, Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) account for more than 99% of all businesses but receive less than 5% of total bank lending. Traditional commercial banks typically require physical collateral and enforce minimum loan amounts.
As a result, many business owners turn to informal lenders that charge high monthly interest rates. Jia circumvents these hurdles by fundamentally altering how risk is assessed, evaluating the creditworthiness of the corporate clients buying from the supplier rather than the supplier's assets.
"Most lenders ask 'is this business risky?' We ask 'is this invoice going to get paid?'" Marks noted. "A small supplier might look risky on paper, no collateral, short operating history, but if they're consistently getting paid by L'Oréal, a major hotel chain, or a multinational distributor, that changes everything."
According to Marks, this data-driven approach allows Jia to deploy capital rapidly while keeping loan losses under 1%.
Lean Headcount and Proprietary AI
The operational core of the company is Ossicone, a proprietary AI credit model built specifically to analyze supply chain transactions in Southeast Asia. Unlike credit-scoring software adapted to Western metrics, Ossicone trains directly on invoice data, localized transaction histories, and B2B payment behaviors.
"Ossicone learns from invoices, payment behavior, and transaction history in these markets, rather than applying models built for US consumers or businesses," Marks said.
To date, the model has processed over 15,000 invoices.
“Every one makes the model sharper,” Marks said.
This heavy reliance on automation allows Jia to maintain a lean headcount of 20 employees.
"Our underwriting doesn't sleep, doesn't have good days and bad days, and gets smarter with every invoice we process. That compresses headcount in ways that traditional lenders simply can't replicate," Marks said. "Every person on this team owns something specific and hard. At 20 people, we've built what most fintechs need 50 to build, and the AI infrastructure that makes that possible is itself a competitive moat."
Measuring Impact on the Ground
Jia's current revenue model relies on what Marks described as “transparent” origination and financing fees on invoice advances. Company financials show a 450% year-over-year growth rate, with cumulative loan originations crossing $20 million. Monthly originations have reached $1 million, compounding at 10% month over month. Marks confirmed that the startup's underlying lending portfolio is profitable, enabling it to reinvest earnings in product expansion.
The company is currently keeping its portfolio intentionally selective, with roughly 50 active SME borrowers – and a target of 200 by the end of the year. Clients include PC Canlas Builders, Euroline, Rare Global Foods, and CIF Central.
One example of how it has helped its customers lies in when Euroline, an ATM servicing firm, requested an early repayment option during a high-performing month. Jia's engineers built the feature directly into the platform on the spot, saving the client tens of thousands in interest, according to Marks.
"We later rolled it out to all borrowers, because we don't want businesses trapped in debt cycles," Marks said.
Future Roadmap: Software and Regional Expansion
The freshly raised $3 million will be spent on expanding the Jia Accounts platform, scaling the Ossicone underwriting engine into a B2B platform for external financial institutions, and deepening on-chain financial infrastructure across networks such as Base, Stellar, Arbitrum, Celo, Polygon, and Ripple.
"Banks have capital and customer relationships,” Marks said. “We give them the intelligence layer and the rails to deploy that capital into SME credit for the first time,"
While the company remains tightly focused on the Philippines to preserve asset quality, international expansion plans are already underway. Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand are on the immediate radar, followed by a long-term look at India, where the founders previously helped launch Tala.
"The playbook travels because the underlying problem is the same everywhere: creditworthy small businesses, sitting on good receivables, invisible to traditional lenders," Marks said.
Jia is not the first time that Marks has started a company. He also previously started online jobs marketplace Oystir, which DOC acquired in 2016.
Nisa Amoils, founder and managing partner at A100x, said her firm was drawn to invest in Jia primarily because of the founders’ “direct experience scaling financial access internationally, rather than launching from a theoretical standpoint.”
“Zach and Cheng didn't come to emerging markets fintech from a pitch deck; they came from years on the ground scaling financial access to millions of borrowers across three continents,” she wrote via email. “That kind of firsthand experience with how these markets actually work, where the friction really is, and what it takes to build trust with underserved businesses, you can't manufacture that.”
Amoils believes Jia also stands out because its architecture was designed to address a specific economic hurdle – small businesses lacking access to credit.
"Most projects in this space start with the technology and go looking for a problem. Jia started with the problem, small businesses being systematically shut out of capital, and then built the technology to solve it,” she added. “That's a completely different starting point, and it produces completely different results.”
Amoils noted that Jia’s tools, including its blockchain backend and AI credit models, were developed out of necessity rather than in response to industry trends.
“None of it was built because it was trendy,” she wrote. “It was built because it was the best solution to a real problem they'd spent their careers trying to solve."
