Zed, a Philippine fintech building credit products for young professionals across Asia-Pacific, closed a $16.5 million Series A led by Accel, the Palo Alto venture firm behind early bets on Facebook, Slack, and Atlassian. The round brings Zed’s total funding to $22.5 million, following a $6 million seed round in March 2021 led by Valar Ventures, the fund co-founded by Peter Thiel that has a track record of backing fintech companies across emerging markets.
What makes the round worth a closer look isn’t the dollar amount, it lands close to Manila’s reported median Series A of $14.5 million, but who’s writing the check and how directly. Philippine startups raising Series A capital typically do so through a regional intermediary, a Singapore-based fund, or a syndicate where a Silicon Valley name participates alongside a local or regional lead rather than leading outright. Accel leading Zed’s round directly, from a company still in an invite-only launch phase, is a comparatively rare pattern for a Philippine-founded startup and suggests Zed’s underlying metrics were strong enough to clear Silicon Valley’s own underwriting bar without a regional fund vouching for it first.
Zed was founded in 2021 by husband-and-wife serial entrepreneurs Steve Abraham and Danielle Cojuangco Abraham, and both bring a specific, relevant prior track record rather than a first-time founder’s blind bet. The pair previously co-founded Symple, the first mobile B2B payments network in the United States, which was backed by Y Combinator and acquired by Feather in 2020. Steve had built the corporate development function at Box, led growth-equity investments in internet and software companies at General Atlantic, the same firm now leading SambaNova’s latest AI-chip round elsewhere in this year’s funding news, and worked in technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley before that. Danielle, who grew up in the Philippines, spent her earlier career as a product design leader at Silicon Valley fintech and healthcare startups after earning an engineering product design degree at Stanford and a design MFA at California College of the Arts. That combination, Steve’s finance and dealmaking background paired with Danielle’s product and design expertise, plus a prior successful YC-backed exit together, is a meaningfully different founder profile than the typical first-time Philippine fintech founder pitching Silicon Valley, and likely eased Accel’s diligence on a company still operating invite-only.
Zed’s first product, launched to invite-only users in mid-2024, is a credit card built around travel, online shopping, and peer-to-peer payment features, underwritten using foundation models that profile customer risk from transaction data, financial documents, and other structured and unstructured signals rather than relying solely on traditional credit-bureau data, a meaningful advantage in a market where a large share of the addressable customer base has thin or no formal credit history. The company has continued shipping since: BSP certified Zed as a standalone credit card issuer, a distinct regulatory milestone from its original lending license, and Zed used that certification to send a fresh batch of invites to roughly 40,000 people off its waitlist. It also launched its credit card on Android in February 2026, adding zero foreign-exchange fees, unlimited virtual cards, and Google Pay support, features aimed squarely at closing the gap with more established digital wallets rather than just growing the invite list.
The traction numbers behind the raise are the part that likely mattered most to Accel. Zed has accumulated nearly 200,000 sign-ups on its waitlist, reportedly built almost entirely through word of mouth rather than paid acquisition, despite the invite-only gating, and the company reported a 500 percent increase in monthly transaction volume since early 2025, a growth rate that, if it holds even partially as Zed scales past its current invite-only cohort, would justify a Silicon Valley-grade valuation more directly than most Philippine fintech pitches can.
Zed’s own expansion plans extend well past the Philippines, the company has flagged Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India as target markets, positioning itself explicitly as a regional APAC credit player rather than a Philippine-first company that might later expand abroad. That framing matters for how the round should be read: Accel isn’t underwriting a Philippine market opportunity narrowly, it’s underwriting a regional credit-infrastructure bet that happens to have started in Manila, similar to how Grab and Sea Group both built regional platforms with a single-country origin point.
The comparison worth drawing is against GCash and Maya’s own credit-product ambitions, both of which are far larger institutions expanding into consumer credit from an existing payments and wallet base rather than starting from credit underwriting itself. Zed’s bet is the inverse: build the underwriting and credit product first, aimed initially at a younger, thinner-credit-file demographic that incumbent banks and even the big wallets have historically underserved, and use that as the wedge into broader financial services. Whether that sequencing proves more defensible than the incumbents’ wallet-first approach is a multi-year question, but it’s a genuinely different strategic bet than the one GCash and Maya are running, which is likely part of what made it an attractive, differentiated pitch to a fund like Accel that has seen both models play out in other markets.
For the broader Philippine startup ecosystem, Zed’s round is a useful data point in the ongoing argument over where growth capital for Philippine-founded companies actually comes from. It didn’t come from a domestic fund, and it didn’t route through a regional intermediary either. It came directly from the same tier of Silicon Valley capital that leads rounds in San Francisco and Bangalore, on the strength of the company’s own numbers and, evidently, its founders’ own prior exit. That’s the more replicable lesson for other Philippine founders chasing a Series A than the specific credit-card product itself: build metrics good enough, and bring a track record credible enough, that a top-tier fund doesn’t need a regional gatekeeper to justify writing the check.
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