Zed Raises $16.5M Series A led by Accel

It’s 2025 and young people in emerging markets still face a banking experience that feels more like 1995: long lines at branches that snake past armed guards, prohibitively high fees to transfer money, and unstable apps with extended periods of “planned downtime” every day. For everyone, basic banking services are still friction filled. For everyone but the old and wealthy, products that carry risk like credit cards are completely out of reach. According to the World Bank, credit card penetration in emerging markets across Asia are sub 15%. 

We started Zed to serve young people across Asia and build a bank for this moment. We launched into our first market, the Philippines, after receiving our Financial Institution license from the Philippine Central Bank (BSP) in 2024. 

Today, we’re pleased to share that we’ve raised a $16.5M Series A led by Accel, bringing our total funding to $22.5M between our Seed and Series A. We’re grateful to have the support of Accel alongside our Seed investors, Valar, Immad Akhund (Mercury), Dalton Caldwell (fmr. Y Combinator) and others. 

What we’re building

Our very first product is a modern credit card that re-invents the primitives banks are built on. Traditional underwriting depends on bureau scores and files that rarely contain enough data to accurately assess the creditworthiness of a young professional. So young people with rising incomes and solid careers still can’t get credit cards, leaving a huge segment of potentially prime customers unserved – simply because of their age. The impact of this is profound in a region where greater than 50% of the population is under 30.

We use foundational models to underwrite the risk of customers based on transaction data, financial documents and other structured and unstructured data sources. This opens up a market of 200 million (and growing) college educated, young professionals across emerging Asia who have stable cash flows, responsible spending and saving patterns and signals of low risk outside of their credit files.

But it’s not enough to be the first credit card for this rising consumer class. Zed will be the first financial product built bespoke for this new generation. Our card focuses on features for travel, online shopping and peer-to-peer payments – the things that Generation Z (or “Zed”) and beyond like to do.

Our waitlist has attracted nearly 200,000 sign ups strictly through word of mouth. Our customer base has grown by 10x and our monthly Gross Merchandise Value (i.e. monthly spend) has grown by ~500% since the beginning of the year. All while the vast majority of our waitlist has yet to be invited.

What’s next?

We’re still very early. Our underwriting is just the first way that we plan on leveraging our own models to serve this class of young consumers whose needs were previously ignored.

Our mission is to build a bank for the next generation that feels like a great private banker. There is an undeniably massive opportunity to define the banking experience for a generation that is coming online just as large foundational models and agent infrastructure mature. Today, banks across Asia (excl. China) collectively generate ~$350B in revenue from their retail bank products. AI will allow us to expand this pie massively, democratizing access to a version of hyper-personalized banking reserved strictly for high net worth individuals and making it accessible to everyone. 

If we can deliver this type of banking to the world’s largest and fastest growing consumer class in Asia, then it will lay the groundwork to serve young people everywhere.

Join us

If you’re a product‑minded engineer, designer or builder who wants to work on hard, high‑leverage problems — real‑time credit with sparse data, safety‑critical consumer systems, multi‑currency payments and AI‑driven experiences — we’d love to talk. We’re hiring in San Francisco (product, design, data science and engineering) and Manila (operations, risk and support). Come help us design the bank that this moment and that this generation deserves.

Steve & Danielle
Co-Founders of Zed