After going through several name changes, Thailand-based payment platform Omise spent the last two years “returning to fundamentals.”

In late 2024, the firm retook the name Omise after brief stints as Synqa and then Opn between 2020 and 2023.

“The rebrand helped realign our teams, messaging, and roadmap with the core payment space where we have the strongest market presence,” Jun Hasegawa, founder of Omise, tells Tech in Asia.

According to the company’s audited financial statement, revenue grew 67% year on year in 2024. This reverses declines in 2021 and 2022 as well as improves upon Omise’s 22% revenue growth in 2023.

Hasegawa says that the company experienced a strong rebound in merchant activity following the Covid-19 pandemic, most notably in ecommerce, travel, digital services, and financial services. This contributed to an increase in transaction volumes in 2024.

Amid this rebound, Omise doubled down on partnerships and expansion.

Last year, it collaborated with Malaysian e-wallet firm BigPay for the latter’s expansion into Thailand. It also acquired MerchantE, a US-based payment processor, in 2022.

These initiatives diversified Omise’s revenue streams and expanded its global footprint, Hasegawa says.

Growth vs. profits

Founded in 2013, Omise provides online payment solutions for businesses in Southeast Asia. Its services include processing credit and debit card transactions, managing bank transfers, and enabling clients to accept payments via e-wallets.

It provides these services to the likes of McDonald’s, DHL, and 7-Eleven.

Some of Omise’s competitors in the space include Xendit in Malaysia and 2C2P in Thailand, which – like Omise – are benefiting from a rise in digital payment adoption across Southeast Asia.

See also: Ant Group’s 2C2P slashes 2023 losses by 93%

Despite the revenue growth, Omise continued to report net losses in 2024 as it “focused heavily” on strengthening its product and tech stack, Hasegawa shares. That said, its net losses narrowed by 44% year on year.

Explaining its persistent net losses, the firm calls the past few years “a period of deliberate investment.”

“We’ve focused heavily on strengthening our product, scaling our infrastructure, and expanding across both regional and global markets,” the founder says, adding that these moves came with upfront costs.

But he adds that Omise is seeing “clear signs of a turning point,” with healthy unit economics, improved margins, and operational efficiencies kicking in. Hasegawa shares that Omise is expecting to hit net profit within the next 18 to 24 months.

Betting on AI

Often, expansion doesn’t come cheap.

In 2024, Omise’s selling and administrative expenses widened by 12% compared to the year before. The company attributes the increase to new hires, go-to-market initiatives, as well as R&D – a bulk of which went into AI.

In an interview in July last year, Omise’s senior vice president of engineering Amborish Acharya said that AI plays a big role in the firm’s tech strategy.

One of its projects is adding agentic AI to the payments process through what Omise calls Agentic Commerce.

Through this solution, customers of Omise’s clients can make purchases by telling an AI bot what they want to buy. The AI then handles product discovery and selection, as well as offers a one-tap checkout.

Aside from its agentic AI efforts, the company is developing internal tools for fraud detection and transaction monitoring. It’s also building an AI-powered payment routing feature that accounts for the user’s payment method, geolocation, or risk profile.

But Hasegawa says these features are still in development or in limited release. As a result, their contribution to revenue in 2024 was minimal.

That said, Omise expects these AI investments to bear fruit in 2026.

This year, the company aims to scale its AI payment platform across Asia, expand its enterprise customer base, and make its operations more efficient.

“In 2025, we expect expense growth to slow as we focus on maximizing what we’ve built and improving operational efficiency, particularly in developer and internal tools,” Hasegawa says.

What if a fund has stopped investing in your market for quite some time?

This could mean a few things: The backer might be waiting for a better time to invest, shifting their focus away from the region, or still raising money for a new fund. It could also be because the market is no longer a priority for them.

Remember, timing your outreach to an investor is crucial.

This list includes funds that have backed at least one company in China in the past two years but have not joined any funding round for tech startups over the last 12 months.

As always, our database is a work in progress. So drop us a note at research@techinasia.com if you spot any inaccuracies or missing information.

For more of our automated data-driven pieces, head here. You can also access our complete database here.

Thailand may be pumping billions of dollars into its digital infrastructure, but its startup ecosystem still hasn’t reached its potential.

In October 2026, the country will host the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, with digital transformation high on the agenda.

Photo credit: tampatra / 123RF

Thailand has recently invested heavily in cloud computing and nationwide 5G coverage, with 7o data centers approved as of the first quarter of 2025.

The country even has a booming digital commerce sector, with ecommerce transactions reaching 6 trillion baht (US$185.3 billion) and e-payments hitting 8 trillion baht (US$247.1 billion) in 2024.

But where are the successful startups driving innovation? And why does their journey so often lead through Singapore?

No government push

The World Bank’s latest Thailand Economic Monitor report says the country lags behind its regional peers in critical areas such as information and communications technology manufacturing, digital services, and, most notably, VC funding for startups.

Part of the challenge lies in the lack of government policies to support the sector.

“A successful entrepreneurial ecosystem – startups and venture capital – always needs to be catalyzed by the government,” says Douglas Abrams, managing director of Expara, an early-stage VC firm based in Singapore that focuses on Southeast Asia.

See also: 25 rising startups in Thailand

Expara was an early-stage investor in payments platform 2C2P, which has grown into a regional player since launching in Thailand. Today, it powers transactions for major clients like Lazada, Singlife, Lenovo, AirAsia, Thai Airways, Changi Airport Group, and luxury hotel brand Capella.

The platform was founded by Myanmar national Aung Kyaw Moe, who created his own company, SinaptIQ, in 2003. The firm developed a payment software that provides one-time passwords for credit card transactions for Thai banks – something still in use today.

A year later, he co-founded Paysbuy – a Thai equivalent of PayPal – which was eventually sold to Thai telecom giant DTAC in 2007 for about 200 million baht (US$6.2 million).

After the sale, Aung joined the Sasin School of Management in Bangkok. It was where he met Abrams, who taught VC courses on top of running Expara.

Aung wanted to build a new company offering comprehensive payment solutions for banks and merchants. Acting on Abrams’ advice, he relocated 2C2P’s headquarters to Singapore in 2008, drawn by the government’s active push to promote its enterprise ecosystem program.

“Singapore is the only country [in Southeast Asia] where you can get serious venture capital investment,” Aung tells The Business Times.

Singapore appeal

One reason foreign VCs gravitate toward Singapore is its legal framework. It’s in English and based on British common law, providing clarity and giving investors confidence.

“The second thing is that in Singapore, you can issue different classes of shares at different prices,” Aung says. “In Thailand, if you want to increase your shares, you have to pay for those shares at par value.”

Providing free stock options to employees is a key early compensation structure for many startups.

“You basically cannot provide incentive stock options for employees [in Thailand],” says Kasima Tharnpipitchai, head of AI strategy at investment firm SCB 10X. “It’s an ongoing problem that the government says they will look at, but haven’t addressed.”

Unlike Singapore, where digital entrepreneurship and VC are national priorities, Thailand’s government has historically focused its innovation agenda on manufacturing, export, and foreign investment, especially in sectors like automotive.

In recent years, this has meant an aggressive push to become Southeast Asia’s electric vehicle manufacturing hub, with sweeping tax incentives for EVs, plug-in hybrids, and even mild hybrids. This campaign has brought Chinese automakers like BYD, Neta, and Great Wall into the fold.

While these efforts have helped position Thailand as a regional EV production center, critics say the country’s heavy focus on multinational manufacturing leaves little space or support for homegrown, venture-backed innovation.

Scaling up

In 2022, Aung and his co-founders sold 2C2P to Ant Financial/Alibaba Group for US$590 million.

“If this was a Thai company, the exit would never have happened, because as a Thai company I would never have been able to grow the company to this size,” he explains. “Singapore is where the capital is, and the image too.”

See also: Thailand widens EV perks as Japan-China auto rivalry accelerates

Another dynamic Thai startup to watch is Meticuly. It was founded by Thai national Boonrat Lohwongwatana, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology.

After years of research on mineral science at US universities, Boonrat returned to Thailand and joined Chulalongkorn University’s engineering department. There, he developed a process for speeding up the manufacture of titanium body implants, including skulls, kneecaps, and hips.

Boonrat is currently in Boston, selling the tech to US hospitals. It’s already widely used in Thailand.

To support Meticuly’s growth ambitions, it also established its headquarters in Singapore in 2022.

While Thailand has struggled to attract independent VC firms, it does have several corporate VC arms operated by major banks and conglomerates. But Boonrat is wary of going down that route.

“When you don’t have enough financial VC [firms] leveraging your growth, then the country is in trouble,” he says. “[All] the bank-backed corporate VC [firms] want is to invest and take over. It’s not that they want you to grow and exit.”

One notable exception is Roojai, a Thailand-based digital insurance platform that’s quietly become one of the country’s most promising tech companies. Founded in 2016, it started as a managing general agent and has recently transformed into a full-stack insurer by acquiring FWD General Insurance’s local operations.

Roojai founder and CEO Nicolas Faquet / Photo credit: Roojai Group

Roojai’s transition has not been easy. Group CFO Nicolas Fauvarque previously told Tech in Asia that 2024 was the company’s “worst year” because of one-time acquisition costs and heavy flooding.

Yet Roojai is forecasting a 49% year-on-year growth in gross written premiums for its 2026 fiscal year, with its Thai business already profitable and its EV insurance emerging as a major growth area.

Conglomerates’ role

In the absence of a strong VC scene, large banks and conglomerates play an outsized role in Thailand’s startup ecosystem compared to its regional peers.

For example, most fintech firms in the country are either founded by the giants or backed by them, as shown by Tech in Asia data. This dynamic can make it hard for Thai startups in the sector to compete with established banks in the country.

Local conglomerates also tend to dominate the exit market for Thai startups via M&As, according to Kid Parchariyanon, founder and managing partner of VC fund SeaX Ventures. This can limit innovation and competition as startups often have to align with legacy players’ interests rather than disrupt them.

Currency converted from Thai baht to US dollar: US$1 = 32.38 Thai baht.

This story was republished with permission from The Business Times, which made the article available to its paying subscribers. It was moderately edited to reflect Tech in Asia’s editorial guidelines.