VESL

VESL (also referred to as VESL Trade Finance) is a Philippine insurance-technology startup, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Pasig, built around a niche but genuinely underserved product: bite-sized trade credit insurance that lets small and medium businesses buy coverage per invoice rather than committing to a large annual policy. The company was founded by an all-women team — Maureen Nova Ledesma, Jessica J. Manipon, and Yroen Guaya Melgar — with Ledesma drawing on a banking and trade-finance background that included structuring deals for the London-based Czarnikow Group.

VESL’s platform connects SMEs seeking invoice financing with insurers, brokers, and lenders across the Philippines and Singapore, letting a business insure a single invoice against non-payment rather than buying broad annual trade credit coverage — a model aimed specifically at smaller businesses for whom a full annual policy is neither affordable nor necessary. The company was the only Philippine startup at the time to go through the Startupbootcamp FinTech accelerator in Singapore, and it won the all-women-led-startup honor at She Loves Tech Philippines in 2019. As of the most recent independently verifiable reporting (around the third quarter of 2021), VESL and its financing partners had enabled up to $30 million in lending to SMEs, with roughly 15% of that allocation going to female-led businesses.

No specific external equity funding amount raised by VESL itself could be independently confirmed in available sources — the $30 million figure above is loan/insurance volume its platform helped facilitate through partner insurers and lenders, not capital raised by the company. Reporting on VESL’s day-to-day operations becomes noticeably sparser after 2021 in publicly available sources, so this entry cannot independently confirm the company’s current operational status beyond that point, though no evidence of a shutdown was found either.

Small and medium Philippine businesses that sell on credit terms bear real non-payment risk from their buyers, but traditional trade credit insurance is typically sold as an expensive annual policy that is impractical for smaller businesses with irregular or seasonal invoice volumes.

Philippine SMEs that need to insure individual invoices against buyer non-payment, and the insurers, brokers, and lenders who provide that coverage and financing through VESL's platform.

VESL unbundles trade credit insurance into a pay-per-invoice product instead of an annual policy, making it accessible to smaller businesses that would otherwise be priced out of trade credit protection entirely, and it was built and led entirely by a founding team of women in a sector where that is still unusual.