Ayannah

Ayannah is a Pasig-based Philippine fintech company founded in 2008 by Mikko Perez, who previously helped steer messaging company Chikka toward profitability and its later acquisition by PLDT. Ayannah was built to serve two overlapping underbanked populations at once: Filipinos working overseas who need to send money and gifts home, and unbanked Filipinos and small businesses who need access to basic digital financial services. Its two flagship products are Sendah, a consumer-facing gift and cash remittance service aimed at overseas Filipino workers, and Sendah Direct, a B2B platform that distributes prepaid mobile credit, online game credits, and microinsurance products through local retail and agent networks.

Over more than a decade of operation, Ayannah has raised disclosed funding from a notable roster of regional and global investors, including a $1 million Series A round from 500 Startups and Life.SREDA, along with backing from Golden Gate Ventures, Beenos, Wavemaker Partners, Visa, and Google for Startups — reported totals across sources range from roughly $5.5 million to $9.1 million, a discrepancy this entry flags rather than resolves, since neither figure could be independently confirmed as more authoritative than the other. The company employs around 43 people according to available data.

In a significant, honestly-disclosed complication to its Philippine identity: Ayannah later merged with Indian payments firm Electronic Cash and Payment Solutions (ECAP) to form a combined pan-Asian entity called Ayannah Global, headquartered in Singapore. This entry treats Ayannah as a genuinely Philippine company on the strength of its founding, its Pasig operating base, its Filipino founder, and its continued focus on the overseas Filipino worker and domestic unbanked markets — while noting that its later corporate structure has a Singapore-headquartered, pan-Asian holding layer above it, a fact any reader evaluating its precise corporate domicile today should be aware of.

Overseas Filipino workers have long faced high fees and slow, inconvenient options for sending money and gifts home, while millions of unbanked Filipinos and small retailers lack easy access to basic digital financial services like mobile credit top-ups or microinsurance.

Overseas Filipino workers sending remittances and gifts to family in the Philippines, and unbanked Filipino consumers and small retail agents who need access to prepaid credit, payments, and microinsurance products.

Ayannah operates on both sides of the same underserved market at once — a consumer remittance and gifting app (Sendah) and a B2B distribution rail for prepaid credit and microinsurance (Sendah Direct) — giving it both a direct-to-diaspora product and an infrastructure layer other financial products can be built on top of.