Xendit, the leading payment infrastructure platform in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, has teamed up with Y Combinator (YC), a US startup accelerator program and investment fund that supports founders at every stage, for YC’s Startup School Manila Meet-up, an event aimed to gather over 70 Filipino startup founders to talk about and learn from each other’s business journey as a part of the Startup School live summer course.
YC’s Startup School’s summer course was a free 7-week online course for current and aspiring entrepreneurs around the world who dream of building a billion-dollar company. Running from June 27 – August 10, the program featured a series of online talks from YC Group Partners and successful YC founders, every Monday and Wednesday via the Zoom conference platform. Movers and shakers from various industries took the virtual stage to impart their work and creative insights from building and growing a startup to igniting business ideas, pitching, planning a minimum viable product (MVP), and more.
With a common vision and goal to foster a dynamic startup community across the region, Xendit and YC have long been supporting each other’s initiatives in the past years. While YC alumni hosted similar meetups all over the world during this live summer course, the Xendit team committed to bringing together founders for three different events in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where they have a strong presence to deliver inspirational talks and Q&A sessions with Startup School participants.
During the meet-up, Xendit Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Moses Lo, talked about his respective journey as an innovator and how he and Bo Chen, Xendit’s Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder, jointly built one of Southeast Asia’s biggest fintech companies today, currently revolutionizing today’s digital payment infrastructure and serving the needs of businesses across Indonesia, the Philippines and beyond.
“As an alumnus of Y Combinator and a staunch supporter of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we’re pleased to see this program growing and now engaging thousands of aspiring business leaders globally. This partnership reflects Xendit’s desire to pay it forward and empower the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Lo. “We take pride in carrying on YC’s torch to spark inspiration and encourage these young minds to solve everyday problems and fill the gaps they see in the market.”
Meanwhile, Yang Yang Zhang, Managing Director of Xendit Philippines, shared how she started her own journey as a woman in tech in the Philippines five years ago. She fell in love with the idea of building a baseline infrastructure to help the country’s economy and development accelerate, which very much aligns with Xendit’s mission to provide payment infrastructure and make payments simple across Indonesia and the Philippines.
“We should spotlight the Philippine market because of its great potential, massive pool of talent, capital and customers, as well as entrepreneurs. With the right tools and mindset, the Filipino startup community can help propel a more inclusive and sustainable economic growth from the grassroot level. That’s why we continue to cultivate partnerships and explore possibilities that will help Filipinos grow their own business,” Zhang emphasized.
For 17 years, Y Combinator has helped founders launch, build, and scale enduring technology companies that solve real problems. They do so through the community they bring together, the products, advice, and capital they provide to founders, and the software they build to enable all of it. The group has been instrumental through their accelerator in launching over 3,000 companies around the world, including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Reddit, and Coinbase. And now through YC’s Startup School program, the company hopes to help aspiring business leaders learn how to start and build a top startup.
As the start-up scene flourishes in the Philippines, recording a 179% increase in its funding in 2021, Xendit continues to help cultivate a fertile ground for business of all sizes to scale by promoting the understanding of and access to valuable tech-driven payment solutions, as well as reliable and robust digital payments infrastructure so SMEs can expand their customer base, and accelerate their business growth.