In this episode, I speak with Zach Marks, co-founder and CEO of Jia, a fintech leveraging blockchain for receivables financing for businesses in Kenya and the Philippines.

Zach has spent his career working in emerging markets, beginning with teaching English in India after college to development consulting in South Sudan. After building and selling his first tech company, an online jobs marketplace, Zach got into fintech when he joined Tala. He spent more than 5 years building and expanding Tala’s consumer lending products across 4 continents, after which he decided to take these skills to small business lending.

Jia helps businesses finance their receivables to access more capital and smooth their cash flows. Jia was founded in early 2023 and has launched operations in Kenya and the Philippines, with plans to scale across emerging markets. Jia has used web3 platforms like Huma to tokenize their loan book and create a pathway for cryptocurrency and stablecoins to be invested in emerging market businesses as an alternative asset class. You can learn more about Jia by visiting jia.xyz.

In this episode, I speak with Chandrima Das, Co-Founder and CEO of Teleskop, a wealth tech that helps people track their family assets today and plan for their legacies in the future.

Chandrima has had an illustrious career in asset management, working at Prudential, ING, and Bank of Singapore in several countries, where she had a front-row seat to the sector’s globalization. In the last 10 years, Chandrima has emerged as a successful fintech leader in Singapore through her founding of robo-advisor fintech Bento and subsequent sale to Grab, becoming GrabInvest.

Now, Chandrima is working on her newest venture, Teleskop, to tackle the legacy wealth management space. Teleskop seeks to aggregate every family’s “Excel sheet” of financial and emotional assets into real-time information capsules that can be accessed by key beneficiaries upon death or incapacitation. They were officially launched just a couple of months ago in May of 2024 and are scaling through B2B partnerships with employers and benefits providers. Teleskop is currently raising their first round of capital - reach out if you would like to get involved. You can learn more about them by visiting teleskop.tech.

In this episode, I speak with Sharon Paul, Co-founder of Headquarters (HQ.xyz), an on-chain business account.

Sharon is a Singaporean entrepreneur and has spent many years advancing the Web3 and payments infrastructure space. She is a founding member of StraitsX, a leading stablecoin issuer and fiat-crypto ramp and now serves on the Singapore Fintech Association's Web3 Subcommittee. Through this work, Sharon realized that despite the rise of on-chain businesses like stablecoins, DeFi, and GameFi, Web3 businesses still rely heavily on traditional banking and payments for daily operations.

Sharon founded HQ.xyz in 2022 to help Web3 businesses manage their finances seamlessly across tokens and fiat. As compliance becomes crucial for Web3, HQ.xyz also streamlines treasury reporting of digital assets. In 2022, HQ.xyz raised $4.5M in pre-seed funding led by MassMutual Ventures, Forge Ventures, and Crypto.com Capital. You can learn more about them by visiting HQ.xyz.