Advance Intelligence Group Closes Over $400 Million Series D Round, AI Technology Reshapes Finance and Retail Sectors
The business covers South Asia, Southeast Asia, Greater China, and Latin America, among other regions.
Advance Intelligence Group, an Asia-Pacific technology company powered by AI, today announced it has raised over $400 million in its Series D round. The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Warburg Pincus, with participation from Gaorong Ventures, Northstar Capital, Yuanjing Capital, and EDBI. Gaorong Ventures had previously led the company's Series C in 2019. Following this round, Advance Intelligence Group's valuation has surpassed $2 billion.
Founded in 2016, Advance Intelligence Group is dedicated to building an AI-enabled, credit-based market ecosystem, creating a smart technology ecosystem serving enterprises, consumers, and merchants. The group's businesses include Atome, Asia's leading buy-now-pay-later platform; ADVANCE.AI, a SaaS big data analytics and enterprise solutions provider; and Ginee, an omnichannel e-commerce service platform.
Currently, Advance Intelligence Group's operations span 12 markets across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Greater China, and Latin America, with 1,500 employees. Its enterprise and consumer businesses collectively serve over 800 enterprise clients, 100,000 merchants, and 20 million consumers.
Following the Series D, Advance Intelligence Group will further accelerate the growth of its buy-now-pay-later and other businesses across Asia, continue increasing R&D investment, deepen and strengthen its AI and big data analytics capabilities to serve more enterprise clients, while also building a more diverse talent pipeline and expanding its global talent pool.
Jefferson Chen, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Advance Intelligence Group, said: "This Series D is an important milestone for us, and none of this would have been possible without the support of our clients, users, partners, investors, and colleagues. We are grateful for their belief that AI technology will bring new transformation to the digital economy. Since our founding, our vision has been to build an AI-enabled, credit-based market ecosystem, advancing the digitalization of e-commerce, retail, financial services, and other industries across Asia. With the backing of this Series D, we will continue to help more large, medium, and small enterprises and merchants accelerate their digital transformation, and provide fairer credit and financial services to consumers and businesses underserved or unserved by traditional banks."
Chang Chen, founding partner of Gaorong Ventures, said: "Since partnering with Advance Intelligence Group, we have seen the company use leading AI technology as its core engine to accelerate coverage of emerging markets across financial services and retail. The company innovatively launched its BNPL product, providing convenient consumer experiences for Asia's new generation of users while enhancing customer value for quality merchants; this business is rapidly becoming important payment infrastructure for local consumption and generating strong synergies with the group's other business segments. We have great confidence in Advance Intelligence Group's core team, which has continuously strengthened its technical capabilities while precisely seizing strategic opportunities and building an efficient cross-border management system. We look forward to Advance Intelligence Group continuing to advance toward its vision of creating a better life through intelligence."
Recently, we spoke with Jefferson Chen about his thinking on business ecosystem synergy, managing diverse cross-border teams, and China going global 3.0.
Q: Advance Intelligence Group has three business lines — enterprise services, consumer services, and merchant services — spanning both B2B and B2C. Why this business line structure, and is there synergy between them?
Jefferson Chen: We believe that AI and data are the most fundamental and important engines driving industrial upgrading and iteration across different sectors. Since day one, our core has been built around AI technology.
Initially, our business served enterprise clients like financial institutions, telecom operators, and internet companies in Southeast Asia, providing risk control, anti-fraud, e-KYC, facial recognition, and other services. We combined world-leading computer vision and anti-fraud technology with risk control talent, alongside localized capabilities in data collection, annotation, modeling, and deployment, to build an AI engine well-suited for international emerging markets. Through this process, we continuously iterated and deepened our technology while accumulating experience in local markets.
Today we are focused on two industries — financial services and retail — because these two sectors are very closely intertwined. The future of financial services must be built on the foundation of the real economy, achieving full integration with scenarios.
Therefore, over the past two years, we have vigorously developed scenario-based financial services. In 2019, anticipating that wallets and payments would increasingly move online in international markets, we launched our buy-now-pay-later business overseas. Before the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, as e-commerce surged in Southeast Asia, we launched Ginee, a multi-channel management ERP system serving merchants, which also performed very well during the pandemic.
When B2B and B2C are combined, data can be further integrated, improving industry efficiency and enhancing user experience. So we have formed an ecosystem with AI technology at its core, with B2C and B2B platforms developing synergistically.
Q: How do you view the future journey of Chinese technology companies going global? What advice do you have for entrepreneurs in this great age of navigation?
Jefferson Chen: I believe Chinese companies going global have now entered the 3.0 era. The 1.0 era was tool apps going global, exemplified by companies like Cheetah Mobile. The 2.0 era, around 2016, saw fintech, e-commerce, and more industrial technology companies going global, when localization capabilities became particularly important.
Why do I say today is the 3.0 era? Because we are facing a highly competitive, highly transparent international market. Companies that are truly capable of going global have largely already done so; many purely local companies in target markets have also developed. So the era of simply copying domestic models to Southeast Asia or Latin America is basically over. Today we must think about what core advantages we possess — whether in supply chain, technology, or other unique resources — to carve out a path and rapidly implement what we truly want to do in target markets.
In this process, my advice is not to "scatter your shots" from the start. Instead, analyze from various angles — population structure, income levels, value-added potential for specific industries — then choose the most suitable few, or even just one or two countries to focus on and deeply cultivate. Only after truly validating the model should you replicate it to other regions and eventually the global market.
Q: Advance Intelligence Group has offices in 12 markets with over 1,500 employees. What management experience and methodology can you share regarding managing cross-border teams?
Jefferson Chen: We started our journey with Singapore and Beijing as dual headquarters, learning through trial and error all the way to our current presence in more than ten countries. There were many lessons along the way, and three points stand out as particularly important.
First, you must respect the culture of target markets and local user habits. Without getting this attitude right, it's very difficult for our business to truly take root. Of course, this respect applies not just externally but internally as well. For employees in each country, their work habits, languages, and what they truly care about must all be fully considered.
Second, you need to combine China's most advanced concepts and technology with local resources and conditions. If you simply respect target market habits without injecting new elements, it's also difficult to produce new chemical reactions in overseas markets. Currently, from the dual perspective of talent and technology-operations integration, we try to have the domestic team serve as the birthplace of ideas, with local teams as the implementers, for each market's expansion.
Third is organizational culture and mechanisms. We need a scientific mechanism that enables talent from different countries, backgrounds, and cultures to truly work together. So within the company, whether in working language, work environment, or decision-making mechanisms, we strive to create an open and transparent culture and atmosphere. Employees from different countries can understand what the company is doing in other countries and business lines, and the logic behind it. At the same time, we continuously empower local talent so they can see room for growth and advancement; for domestic employees with a global perspective, we encourage them to try new things in different countries, forming a healthy talent mobility mechanism.
Organizational culture, combined with respect for local markets and technology exchange, can bring qualitative change to cross-border management and business development.
Q: What impact has COVID-19 had on you personally, the company, and the team? How do you maintain firm conviction amid uncertainty?
Jefferson Chen: My experience has been very profound. From studying to working to now, over more than twenty years, I have experienced three major crises: SARS in 2003, the global financial crisis in 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic from last year to now. For the first two I was on campus; this pandemic is the first time I have fully, deeply experienced such a "tsunami." In a very short time, almost every target market we operate in was affected. The speed and intensity of this impact were truly astonishing.
In this process, we went from being initially shocked; to realizing we needed to rapidly make strategic adjustments; to today, where we have stabilized and are growing faster than before. So over the past 18 months, whether myself or every employee at our company, we have all had firsthand experience. There are several things I learned from this process.
First, decision-making speed must be fast. Because information is always limited, and if decisions are slow, it can likely make the difference between a company's life and death. So when you see major trends coming, you must start making some decisions even before new information is fully gathered. Crisis moments place very high demands on both the speed and accuracy of decisions.
Second, you need a particularly close-knit, united team. Because in the process of strategic adjustment, when you need to shut down some businesses and launch new ones, there will inevitably be various voices. Therefore, the core team needs sufficient cohesion, and middle management and frontline employees must fully understand why the company is making such decisions. So team unity and cohesion are crucial.
Third, value communication. Every decision needs to be communicated to every employee in the company from top to bottom in an orderly manner.
The challenges and strategic adjustments brought by the pandemic made us "slimmer," while also amplifying us — the speed and intensity of this entire folding process were truly astonishing. Looking back, the past 18 months have been relatively successful. From top to bottom, we have been running in a relatively unified direction, and now our direction is very clear. Organizational resilience, talent quality, and combat effectiveness have all improved. Basically, the pandemic's impact on us has completely passed, and has even become positive.
Q: Recommend a book you've read recently.
Jefferson Chen: The pandemic has given many people more time to look at new things, new markets, and new opportunities. My personality leans more toward thinking about how to make this company better, how to be a better CEO. Some time ago I read Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, about Elon Musk's journey. This book had a great impact on me.
Musk's achievements today are no accident. If he succeeded with one company, that might be accidental; but over the past 20-plus years, he has built multiple highly successful companies, even multiple number ones in the world's most innovative fields — this is no accident.
To summarize, Musk's success stems from two things — Crazy Vision, Crazy Execution. You need to have wildly ambitious ideas to attract the top talent, like sending all of humanity to Mars; and you need the most crazy execution. When he started SpaceX, he didn't simply hand an idea to a bunch of rocket people. He visited Russia three times, wanting to buy rockets. Later discovering the costs were too high, on the flight back he sketched out a design himself and calculated the cost of SpaceX's first rocket.
So in this process, for many of the most core technical challenges, he was deeply involved. Musk is not a simple CEO; he is even CTO, COO — his role constantly changes.
I believe that for a good CEO, you must have sufficient vision, sufficient vision, and the ability to learn extremely quickly, constantly extending your core outward.
