First Circle

First Circle was founded in 2016 in the Philippines by Tony Ennis, Patrick Lynch, and Jorrit Koop to finance business-to-business trade transactions for small and medium enterprises — an SME lending gap the founders had each separately observed while working in finance and technology across the region. Ennis had been CTO at Web Summit owner Ci Labs, Lynch was formerly at Morgan Stanley, and Koop had led CompareAsiaGroup.

Over roughly a decade, First Circle built out a business-lending platform offering working-capital credit lines, invoice financing, and — more recently — fee-free business banking and payment tools for Philippine SMEs, positioning itself against slow, collateral-heavy traditional bank lending.

As of its most recent disclosed funding (a 2024 Series B round backed by the IFC, with Accion, Insignia Ventures, Fasanara, and Endeavor also participating), First Circle remained an independently operating, actively growing company, having funded several thousand SME customers and raised over $37 million in total across five rounds since founding — one of the more durable and well-capitalized Philippine fintech lenders from this era.

Philippine SMEs engaged in B2B trade often wait weeks for buyers to pay outstanding invoices, while needing immediate cash to fulfill the next order — a working-capital timing gap that traditional bank loans, with slow approval and heavy collateral requirements, rarely solved for smaller businesses.

Small and medium enterprises in the Philippines engaged in business-to-business trade, needing working capital, invoice financing, or business banking tools rather than traditional secured bank credit.

First Circle built its underwriting around actual trade transaction data rather than collateral or years-long credit history, letting it serve SMEs that conventional Philippine banks would typically decline. It has since expanded from pure invoice financing into broader business banking and payments, a natural extension once it had transaction and repayment data on thousands of SME customers.