Leadmanagementsolutions

Coming off 2021’s global funding highs, Singapore’s Coda Payments raised $690 million earlier this year from big league backers including the city-state’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and America’s Insight Partners and Smash Capital. That investment—its highest ever, which tipped the value of the payments platform for online game purchases at $2.5 billion—rewarded an elusive benchmark among Southeast Asia’s unicorns: profitability. The VC funding environment has since turned bleak amid rising inflation and interest rates and the heightened risk of a global recession. But that doesn’t worry Neil Davidson, co-founder and executive chairman of Coda Payments. The funding raise, a secondary share sale, gave some returns to early investors including the firm’s founders, but it wasn’t necessary to tap fresh capital, he says in a video call from his office in Los Angeles. The company already had sufficient cash flow, which jumped fourfold to $68 million in the year ended September 2021, accordin...