Kelvin Teo: Startup Story, Funding & Lessons (2026)

Funding Societies, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Asia, has disbursed over $1 billion in loans to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). Founded by Kelvin Teo and backed by firms like Sequoia, Softbank Ventures, and Golden Gate Ventures, they did this by cracking the hardest puzzle in startups: the marketplace cold start problem.

For founders, a marketplace is a tantalizing model. But getting one off the ground means solving the classic chicken-and-egg dilemma: you can't get customers (borrowers) without inventory (lenders), and you can't get inventory without customers. Most founders fail here.

This is the playbook for how you can succeed. We’ll break down the tactical frameworks for igniting a two-sided marketplace and how you must evolve as a leader as it scales.

Solving the Marketplace Cold Start Problem

Every marketplace founder faces a dead platform with no users. Your first job is to manufacture the initial spark that leads to a self-sustaining fire. Don't try to launch to everyone. Instead, focus on creating a single, hyper-specific, liquid market. The three most common strategies are to constrain the market, artificially pump one side, or provide a single-player tool.

Strategy 1: Constrain the Market

Your goal is not to build a massive, empty stadium, but to fill a single VIP section. You need to constrain your market by geography, vertical, or a combination of both until you can create a high probability of a successful transaction.

For Funding Societies, this might have meant focusing only on manufacturing SMEs in Singapore seeking loans between $50,000 and $100,000. Not all of Singapore. Not all SMEs. A tiny, well-defined slice.

Define your "atomic unit": What is the smallest possible version of your marketplace that can stand on its own? Is it one neighborhood for a delivery service? One type of collectible for a hobbyist marketplace? Be brutally specific. · Engineer early success: Once you have your atomic unit, manually match the first handful of transactions. Do things that don’t scale. Call suppliers yourself. Onboard the first customers personally. Your goal is 10 perfect transactions, not 1,000 mediocre ones.

Common Mistake: Premature geographic expansion. Founders get one city working and immediately try to launch in ten more. This stretches resources and dilutes network effects. Master one niche, then expand to an adjacent one.

Strategy 2: Subsidize One Side of the Market

Sometimes, one side of the marketplace is more valuable or harder to acquire than the other. When that’s the case, you need to "buy" their loyalty until the other side shows up. This usually means paying them directly or offering significant discounts.

In a lending marketplace like Funding Societies, the lenders (supply) are the critical and harder side to secure. Without capital to lend, there is no product. The rational strategy is to heavily incentivize the first cohort of lenders.

Which side is more price-sensitive? Subsidize them. · Which side’s participation creates more value for the other? Subsidize them. In a lending marketplace, one lender can fund multiple SMEs, making their value higher early on. · Which side is harder to get? Subsidize them.

Your subsidy can be a direct financial incentive (e.g., "Sign up as a lender and get a 1% cash bonus on your first $50,000 of capital") or a guarantee to remove risk (e.g., a first-loss guarantee on the initial loans).

Strategy 3: Build a "Single-Player" Tool

Another approach is to attract one side of the market with a useful tool they can use independently before you introduce the second side. Once you have a critical mass of users on one side, you can open the marketplace to the other.

For example, a marketplace for freelance designers could start by offering a free, high-quality invoicing tool. Once thousands of designers are using the tool, you can launch the "hire a designer" marketplace to businesses.

Scaling Yourself as the Company Grows

As your marketplace finds traction, your job as a founder must change. The skills that get you from 0 to 1 are not the same ones that get you from 1 to 100. Failing to recognize this is a primary driver of founder burnout and replacement.

Phase 1: Founder as Doer (Pre-Seed/Seed)

In the beginning, you do everything. You are the head of product, sales, marketing, and support. Your job is to personally execute, test hypotheses, and find a repeatable model. You might be manually onboarding the first lenders and calling potential SME borrowers yourself.

Your primary metric: Learning velocity. Are you iterating quickly enough to find what works before you run out of money?

Phase 2: Founder as Player-Coach (Series A)

After raising a Series A (Funding Societies raised nearly $60 million in total), you have the capital to build a team. You start hiring your first functional leaders (e.g., Head of Sales, Head of Operations). Now, your job splits. You are still in the trenches, but you are also managing your first direct reports.

This is the hardest transition for most founders. You have to delegate tasks you are good at to people who will initially do them worse than you.

Red Flag Checklist: When to Delegate You are the bottleneck for a key business area. You spend more than 25% of your week on tasks you aren't an expert in. You are reviewing every minor decision your new hires make. You haven't taken a day off in six months because "things would break."

Phase 3: Founder as Architect (Series B and Beyond)

At this stage, your job is no longer to do the work or even to manage the doers. Your job is to manage the managers. You are designing the organization itself—its culture, its communication structures, and its strategic priorities. You are hiring executives who are far more experienced in their domains than you are.

Setting the vision and strategy. · Recruiting and retaining senior talent. · Allocating resources. · Managing your board and investors. · Being the external face of the company.

Lessons from Building in a Market Like Southeast Asia

Building a company in an emerging startup ecosystem like Southeast Asia requires a different approach than simply copying a Silicon Valley playbook. Kelvin Teo and Funding Societies navigated a complex landscape of different regulations, cultures, and market maturities across the region.

The presence of top-tier investors like Sequoia, Softbank Ventures, Golden Gate, Alpha JWC Ventures, Qualgro VC, The Graduate Syndicate, and Line Corporation on their cap table shows the region's potential. But it doesn't change the on-the-ground reality.

Founders in these markets must obsess over localization. A lending product that works in Singapore may not work in Indonesia or Malaysia without significant changes to onboarding, risk assessment, and collections. You must build a team with deep local context and empower them to adapt the model.

How to Apply This This Week

Map your "atomic unit." Whiteboard the absolute smallest, most specific version of your marketplace. Who are the 10 customers and 10 suppliers you need for it to work? Write down their profiles. · Run the subsidy test. Answer the three questions (price sensitivity, value creation, difficulty) to determine which side of your marketplace you should focus on acquiring first. Sketch out a "bonus" offer for them. · Conduct a delegation audit. List your top 5 most time-consuming weekly activities. For each one, ask: "Who could I hire or train to do this at 80% of my quality?" Start the delegation process for one of them this week. · Review your leadership phase. Are you a Doer, Player-Coach, or Architect? Are you playing the right game for your company's current stage? Identify one behavior you need to change to level up.