December 2023 to December 2024. A trade finance startup I co-founded with Kenneth Yap, built during the Antler SG15 residency.
the problem
Maritime trade is capital-intensive and slow to pay. SMEs in the space — freight forwarders, suppliers, port agents — often have valid invoices sitting unpaid for 60–90 days while their own operating costs don't wait. Traditional banks are slow, collateral-heavy, and rarely structured for the nuances of cross-border maritime deals. The result is a chronic cash flow gap that stunts growth for businesses with perfectly good receivables.
how we got here
Kenneth and I go back to around 2018, when we were introduced through the SUSS entrepreneurship programme. He was running HeyCoins, a coin conversion startup; I was still in the middle of fundMyLife. We stayed loosely in touch over the years. When we both ended up at Antler's SG15 cohort at the end of 2023, the timing finally aligned to build something together.
what we built
BorderDollar was a cross-border invoice financing platform for maritime SMEs. Businesses could upload unpaid invoices and access working capital against them. On the investor side, those invoices were offered as an alternative asset class to high-net-worth funders looking for yield outside of equities.
During the build, we acquired the algorithm and proprietary data from a prominent trade finance startup at an undisclosed sum — this gave us a meaningful head start on our credit scoring model rather than starting from scratch.
We also built MediaDollar — an RSS scraper pulling from six maritime publications every six hours — as the data collection layer for an NLP-driven risk signal pipeline.
funding
- US$125,000 pre-seed from Antler (SG15 cohort)
- US$133,000 from the Stellar Community Fund to build stablecoin-based crowdfunding for invoices — a minor but real pivot from fiat invoice financing toward on-chain settlement
what we tried
When PMF wasn't coming through on the core lending product, we explored pivoting both upstream (procurement financing) and downstream (collections). Neither stuck. The market was real but the wedge wasn't sharp enough, and the sales cycle for financial products in maritime is long.
We shut it down in December 2024.