Jaime Hing III

Doing It Again: Building a payments company to Series A

This month, we finalized our Series A investment from our major investor, Kollab. It is an important milestone for PayRex, but more than anything, it is a marker of responsibility. Series A does not change what we are building; it sharpens how we build it. The work remains the same: building a modern, reliable payment infrastructure for businesses in the Philippines that lasts.

PayRex's inception in 2023 began as an idea between my co-founder, Edwin Lacierda, and me to start another payments company. The idea was simple: to solve the problems around payments and business reconciliation, which we consider the true end-to-end cycle of processing payments.

From our combined experience running our first startup, backed by investors such as Y Combinator and Stripe, we applied what we learned to run PayRex with a very lean team. With 19 people, we achieved our first ₱ 1 billion in TPV in less than a year since going live.

Building a second startup has come with several approaches that are entirely the opposite of my first experience. Here are some of them (should I create a longer list?):

• One of the most challenging was building a product from scratch with only 11 engineers while serving enterprise merchants from day one. This was the opposite of how I co-founded my first startup, which started with small businesses and gradually moved upmarket.
• We started and closed deals almost entirely through referrals. We never spent much on ads or marketing. One thing we learned from YC is that the best marketing cost is $0. Through connections from early investors and our own, Edwin and I pitched to more than 40 enterprise businesses.
• There was no long, winding product roadmap. Instead, we had straightforward conversations with prospects, went back to the drawing board, and built. Our current products are shaped directly by merchant feedback. While there are many features we want to build, we are disciplined about prioritizing based on what our customers and prospects actually need.
• We operated with a very small but highly efficient team. We hired engineers first, followed by onboarding, legal, compliance, and fraud and risk functions, only when they were truly needed.

This new investment gives us a little more room to breathe, but it also makes the responsibility clearer. Every decision now carries more weight for our team, our merchants, and the businesses that trust PayRex to handle something as critical as payments.

Building a second company has been humbling in different ways. Experience helps, but it does not remove uncertainty. What it gives me is clarity about what matters: building slowly where it counts, listening closely to customers, and surrounding myself with people who care deeply about the details.

I'm grateful to our team who chose to stay and build with us, and to the merchants who trusted us early. For now, it's back to work, continuing to build payment infrastructure for the Philippines, one careful decision at a time.

Here's the blog post from our new investor.