Zed, a Philippines-based startup building credit products for young professionals across the Asia-Pacific region, has raised $16.5 million in a Series A funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Palo Alto, California-based Accel led the financing, which brings Zed’s total funding raised to $22.5 million. The startup’s latest round comes amid a robust period for fintech investment overall: Global venture funding to financial technology startups in 2025 has, as of Dec. 8, reached $48.7 billion across 3,498 deals, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 29.5% increase in dollars raised compared to the $37.6 billion raised across 4,588 deals during the same time period in 2024.
An ‘aha’ moment
Founded in 2021 by husband and wife serial entrepreneurs Steve Abraham and Danielle Cojuangco Abraham, Zed’s initial market has been the Philippines.
The pair stumbled upon the idea for Zed after selling their previous company, Symple, a B2B mobile payments network, to Feather in 2020. When traveling to the Philippines, where Danielle is originally from, the couple describes having an “aha experience.”
After landing at the airport, they were going to meet Danielle’s brother at a bar three miles away.
“It really should have taken only 15 minutes. But it ended up taking a full hour, because we realized it was payday Friday, where everyone’s rushing to the ATMs after work,” Danielle recalls. “They’re pulling out their entire paychecks and spending them all night because they’ve been waiting to shop with that cash that they’ve gotten that day.”
When they got to the bar, the couple noticed that Danielle’s brother paid for refreshments in cash. They were confused why the young man — a lawyer at a prestigious firm — didn’t use a credit card.
His response when asked? “I tried. I’ve gone to three banks, and they’ve all rejected me. I can’t get a credit card.”
“That was the moment that Steve and I realized that we just had to dig into this, and learn more about this opportunity,” Danielle said.
And so Zed was born.
Regulation and risk management
The co-founders/co-CEOs spent the first three years of Zed’s life acquiring the startup’s financial institution license from the Central Bank of the Philippines. They then launched Zed’s first product — a “modern” credit card that focuses on features for travel, online shopping and peer-to-peer payments — in mid-2024.
“To get our license, we had to set up a compliance org and operations org and essentially pass all of the application checks that any bank would have to pass,” Steve told Crunchbase News in an interview. “That took a while — it was a beast of an effort. … In order to do this, we’ve had to reinvent the primitives that banks are built on.”
Traditional banks, he said, rely exclusively on credit scores, which are based on factors that depend heavily on age — such as how long a person has had their accounts or how many credit lines they’ve ever opened.
“So young people, like recent college graduates, with growing incomes, stable jobs and no negative marks in their files still can’t get credit cards because of low scores that are only a reflection of their age,” he added. “This leaves a huge segment of potentially prime customers unserved.”
Zed uses foundational models to profile and underwrite the risk of customers based on transaction data, financial documents, and other structured and unstructured data sources. That way, the pair said, Zed can serve young professionals with signals of low risk across data sources such as stable cash flows, responsible spending and saving patterns, and other factors.
“This approach unlocks massive opportunity across a region where less than 50% of the population is under 30 and where current credit card penetration is sub-15%, excluding China and Singapore,” Danielle said.
Targeting a younger customer base
Zed’s biggest competitors are long-established, incumbent banks that are more focused on older and wealthier customers, the pair said.
They’ve intentionally designed Zed’s credit card to have features that are geared toward the young professional, including zero FX fees and zero FX markup; the ability to create single-use or 24-hour cards that automatically close themselves, and the ability to send each other money “as easily as using Venmo but with the flexibility of settling when their card statement is due.”
For now, Zed is still in the invite-only launch period. Its waitlist has attracted nearly 200,000 sign-ups “strictly through word of mouth.” The company says its customer base has grown by 10x, and its monthly gross merchandise value (monthly spend) has grown by about 500% since the beginning of 2025. The startup generates revenue from interchange fees and interest on purchases made by customers using its credit card.
“The vast majority of our waitlist has yet to be invited,” Steve said.
Presently, Zed has 13 employees across San Francisco and Manila. Operations are headquartered in Manila, while product and design employees work out of San Francisco.
The startup in March 2021 raised $6 million in a seed round that was led by Valar Ventures and included participation from Mercury CEO and founder Immad Akhund, along with Dalton Caldwell, Kunal Shah and other angels.
Looking ahead, Zed wants to expand throughout the APAC region, including markets such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and India.
“Eventually, our plan is to expand globally and connect young people who share a common lifestyle and financial goals, wherever they may be, from Asia to North America,” Danielle said.
Accel Partner Nafis Jamal, who previously worked as head of consumer payments at fintech giant Circle, told Crunchbase News via email that he believes Zed has potential because “very few people” have access to credit despite the fact that the Philippines is one of the youngest, fastest-growing markets in the region.
The firm was also drawn to the co-founding team’s experience.
“Danielle and Steve bring serious technical talent and a deep understanding of the local customer and regulatory landscape,” he said. “Second, they execute with unusual discipline: smart underwriting paired with a product that feels incredibly intuitive to use.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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