Advance Intelligence, the Singapore-based owner of buy now, pay later service Atome, raises $400M Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $2B valuation
Yong Jun Yuan / The Business Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
Advance Intelligence has traveled far from the business that funded it: in 2019 the company raised an $80M Series C selling fraud-detection and credit-scoring AI to banks, and today it is a $2B company whose best-known asset is Atome, a consumer buy-now-pay-later service. The $400M Series D marks the moment the B2B risk-analytics vendor became a consumer-lending platform.
The round also slots into SoftBank Vision Fund 2's concentrated Southeast Asia push — the same fund led Carro's $360M Series C at a $1B+ valuation in June and backed Indonesian payments startup OY! Indonesia on this same day — while rival BNPL player Pace has just come off its own raise, signaling that Singapore's BNPL field is crowding quickly.
First-order effects
- Atome gets a war chest sized two orders of magnitude above what any regional BNPL peer has disclosed, letting it outspend Pace — fresh off a $40M Series A — in merchant acquisition across Southeast Asia.
- SoftBank Vision Fund 2 now holds stakes spanning BNPL (Atome), auto commerce (Carro), and payments infrastructure (OY! Indonesia) in one region, giving it portfolio-level leverage over how consumers transact.
Second-order effects
- Undercapitalized BNPL entrants face a competitor whose cost of capital just dropped sharply, forcing Pace and others toward niche verticals or acquisition talks rather than head-on merchant subsidies.
- Advance Intelligence can feed the credit-scoring data it sells to third-party banks into Atome's own underwriting, an internal flywheel that standalone BNPL startups cannot replicate and that pressures banks buying its risk models.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Southeast Asian consumer finance consolidates around companies that own both the risk models and the lending book, with pure-play lenders absorbed or squeezed by platform owners.
- A single investor holding positions across payments, credit, and commerce in the same geography foreshadows a regional structure where SoftBank-affiliated services interconnect, shaping which payment rails dominate the market.
The trend: Southeast Asia's buy-now-pay-later race is consolidating around AI-underwriting platforms, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 funding multiple legs of the stack simultaneously.