We've been public about JuniGo's origin story: Amy spent three years managing cross-border supplier payments for a Singapore electronics distributor, watching the FX spread and SWIFT fee stack eat 3 to 4% of every transaction while settlement arrived on day three or four. The frustration was the founding thesis. But frustration is not a product. So we want to share what actually happened when we built one.
The First Decision: One Corridor First
In early 2025, Kai and I made a deliberate choice not to launch with 150 corridors. We launched with one: Singapore to India. SGD to INR. The reasoning was straightforward. It's one of the highest-volume B2B payment corridors in Southeast Asia. It has strong local banking rail infrastructure on the India side. And it's the corridor we understood best from direct operational experience at our previous company.
Building broad coverage quickly would have meant relying entirely on SWIFT and correspondent banking relationships for most corridors, which defeats the point. We wanted to demonstrate what direct local rail settlement actually looks like for finance teams before adding corridors we couldn't service the same way.
The First 60 Days: SGD 1.8 Million Processed
Between June and August 2025, JuniGo's MVP processed SGD 1.8 million in Singapore-to-India payments. Small by institutional standards. Significant for two people running a payment infrastructure company from a serviced office in Tanjong Pagar.
The numbers from that period:
- 94% of transactions settled same-day. The remaining 6% settled next business day, mostly due to NEFT timing windows on Indian bank holidays.
- Average FX markup: 0.6% above mid-market. Against a 3.1% average spread from the Singapore commercial banks used by our pilot customers on the same corridor over the prior 12 months.
- 0 payment failures. Every payment that passed our beneficiary verification check was successfully delivered. We had 4 payments fail verification before dispatch and were corrected before funds moved.
- Average customer saving: SGD 1,540 per month for businesses transacting SGD 60,000 to 80,000 monthly on the corridor.
These are real numbers from actual transactions in a two-person company's first operational period. Not projected savings. Not benchmark comparisons. Actual delivered performance.
What We Got Wrong
Honestly, onboarding took too long. Our KYC process for business verification required 5 to 7 business days and multiple document rounds. Acceptable for an institutional client. Not acceptable for a finance manager trying to switch payment providers mid-quarter who wants to run their first payment within the week. We've since rebuilt the onboarding flow to complete standard KYC in 48 to 72 hours and expedited KYC in 24 hours for businesses with standard Singapore business registration and clean AML profiles.
We also underinvested in reconciliation tooling in the MVP. Our first customers had manual reconciliation processes. They could see payment status in the JuniGo dashboard. They couldn't push it automatically to NetSuite or QuickBooks. The ERP integration was the first major product investment after the MVP period, and it's now live for all three major accounting platforms.
Real talk: launching with a narrower product than you want is hard when you're competing for attention against established providers. But we learned more about what finance teams actually need in the first 60 days of real usage than we learned in six months of user interviews. Get the first corridor right before adding the next ten.
Expanding From Seed Stage to 150 Corridors
JuniGo's Series A from gumi Cryptos Capital (closed Q4 2025) funded the corridor expansion and team buildout. As of early 2026, we cover 150+ countries through a combination of direct local banking relationships in 35 high-volume corridors, SWIFT with preferred correspondents for standard international corridors, and stablecoin-assisted bridge settlement for high-fee thin corridors where neither option provides competitive economics.
The expansion methodology has been the same in each corridor: build or partner for direct local settlement before adding the corridor. If we can't offer same-day or next-day settlement with a disclosed spread under 1%, we don't add the corridor as a primary offering. We'd rather have 35 corridors that work well than 150 that are indistinguishable from a bank SWIFT wire.
Where We Are Now
The business is early. Seed stage. We process several million USD equivalent per month across our corridor network, with the Singapore-India, Singapore-Vietnam, and Singapore-Philippines corridors as our highest-volume routes. Our four-person team covers product, growth, engineering, and compliance. We're not a large company yet.
What we can say with confidence: the economics of transparent local rail settlement versus correspondent banking SWIFT wires are not marginal. They're 3 to 4 percentage points of difference per transaction, every transaction. For a mid-market business sending USD 500,000 per year in international supplier payments, that's USD 15,000 to USD 20,000 annually in FX and fee costs that can be reduced by switching to a lower-spread platform on their primary corridors.
That's the entire case for JuniGo in one number. Not novel technology, not a structural reinvention. Just transparency and better routing on a problem that costs mid-market businesses real money every month. We think that's enough to build a significant company on. We're proving it one corridor at a time.
