Olea Raises $30 Million to Expand Trade Finance Platform

The company’s Series A round, announced by the Singapore-based startup last week, was led by BBVA and will help Olea invest in artificial intelligence (AI) driven analytics, Web3 readiness and expertise in areas such as embedded finance.

‘This funding marks an important milestone in Olea’s journey,” Amelia Ng, CEO of Olea, said in a news release. “The confidence shown by our new and existing investors is a powerful validation of the business we’ve built–institutional-grade, scalable, and ready for the next phase of growth. We are committed to building an efficient and accessible trade ecosystem that connects capital, commerce, and technology.”

The presence of BBVA as lead investor will help speed Olea’s expansion into new parts of Europe, the U.S., Latin America and Asia, the release added.

Launched in 2022, Olea has a capital market services license (CMS) from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and works to “transform trade finance through technology, data intelligence and institutional governance,” per the release.

The company’s new funding round comes at a moment when, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, trade finance is shifting “beyond a passive necessity” for CFOs to become “a strategic frontier, and one where innovation, agility and connectivity are increasingly colliding.”

Historically, that report added, trade finance has been a conservative corner of banking. Letters of credit, export credit insurance and factoring programs experienced a slower evolution, held back by paper-based processes and risk-averse compliance teams.

“Bills of lading passed through couriers, letters of credit crawled through manual approvals and invoice financing was riddled with delays and opaque fees,” PYMNTS wrote in a separate report. “The persistence of these manual processes has long been tolerated as the cost of doing business across borders.”

However, companies have outgrown these tools as modern supply chains have grown more complex with the inclusion of more counterparties, currencies and regulatory jurisdictions.

“The reality is that the world is moving way faster than most companies can keep up pace with,” Wendy Tapia, head of product, receivables, at FIS, told PYMNTS in an interview in September. “Because of legacy systems, there are still a lot of organizations that are stuck in heavily manual processes, very fragmented systems. Without realizing it, they are limiting their agility and ability to scale.”