SINGAPORE, August 5, 2026: For many small and medium-sized enterprises, growth is not limited by ambition. It is limited by access to working capital. That gap sits at the heart of the Choco Up story.
In this conversation on Asia Insights, Percy Hung, Founder & CEO of Choco Up, spoke about why the company was created, how it approaches SME financing differently from traditional lenders, and why technology, data and ecosystem partnerships are becoming central to how businesses access growth capital.
Hung said the idea for Choco Up came from his own experience as an operator. Before starting the company around 2018-2019, he and his friends were involved in e-commerce, digital platforms, F&B and SME businesses. They found that small companies often struggled to secure capital from traditional banking channels, especially when they lacked collateral or a long track record.
“We were the end-users,” Hung said, explaining that the company was born from the difficulty of getting growth capital for real businesses. The team first began deploying money to businesses they knew, then gradually built the technology and product layer around that experience.
The company’s name also reflects an attempt to move away from the conventional language of finance. Hung said Choco Up did not want to sound like a traditional financing, capital or fund business. “We all love chocolate,” he said, adding that chocolate brings energy and lifts the mood, which is the spirit behind the brand.
A Focused Regional Strategy
Choco Up has now been operating for more than seven years. At one stage, Hung said, the company was active in as many as 15 markets across Asia-Pacific. But that footprint proved too wide for a small team.
Over the past few years, Choco Up has narrowed its focus to three markets: Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. The reason, Hung explained, is that these markets have more robust legal systems, stronger technology infrastructure and better integration possibilities with banks, platforms, payment companies and other technology providers.
That discipline reflects one of the larger themes of the conversation. Choco Up is not trying to grow by entering as many markets as possible. It is trying to go deeper in markets where data access, legal recourse and ecosystem partnerships can support a more scalable financing model.
Hung said the company had learnt from earlier overexpansion and now wants to build more sustainably. “We are still not deep enough in the three markets,” he said, adding that timing is important and that expanding too fast can be a costly mistake.
Not Competing With Banks
Hung is clear that Choco Up does not see itself as a direct competitor to banks.
Banks have multiple products, deeper capital resources and their own lending models. Choco Up, by contrast, focuses on areas where traditional bank processes may not be efficient enough for smaller-ticket or faster-moving SME needs.
A bank may have to go through similar underwriting processes for a US$50 million facility and a US$50,000 loan, Hung said. For banks, the return on effort may be lower for smaller deals. For Choco Up, that is precisely where the opportunity lies.
The company is happy when customers grow from a US$50,000 facility to US$100,000, US$200,000, US$500,000 and eventually up to US$1 million in financing support.
In Hung’s view, the relationship between Choco Up and banks can be complementary. When customers grow large enough to be served by banks, the company sees that as a positive outcome. Choco Up also uses bank infrastructure in its operating markets to support repayment and receivables processes.
Underwriting Beyond Collateral
Choco Up’s approach to credit assessment is built around both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Hung said the company studies the health of the business, the industry it operates in, the products or services being sold, concentration risks, and the quality of the business owner. It also runs simulations to assess how long the business can survive under its current model.
This is where technology becomes central. Hung said Choco Up breaks its underwriting process into 10 to 15 steps, with each step supported by product and technology. This enables the company to operate at scale and with speed. AI has made the process more efficient, helping the company pursue accuracy and efficiency in deal assessment.
The company’s repayment model is also technology-enabled. Instead of relying heavily on manual chasing, Choco Up works with wallet solution providers, payment gateways, POS providers and banks to make collections more seamless.
Why One-Size-Fits-All Lending Does Not Work
A major lesson for Choco Up has been that different industries require different underwriting models.
Hung said the company initially made the mistake of treating every business, whether a tech startup, F&B business, digital platform or e-commerce brand, as if it belonged in the same funnel. That created heavy workloads for credit officers and slowed the process.
Today, Choco Up builds different models for different verticals. For F&B and retail businesses, the company works with POS system providers that give access to live transaction data. Hung gave the example of a POS partner where Choco Up can see transaction data from every pizza or bowl of chicken rice being sold, and assess supplier payments, consistency and seasonality.
For e-commerce businesses, the data set and underwriting logic are different. For construction-linked businesses, Choco Up may work with tendering platforms where account payables and receivables can be observed, adding another layer of data and security.
Hung said this platform-integrated approach is part of what differentiates Choco Up from many private lenders or alternative lenders. It requires in-house technology and product capabilities, but it gives the company a deeper view of the business than a static loan application might provide.
AI as an Efficiency Layer, Not a Replacement for Judgement
Hung said Choco Up’s technology journey has evolved significantly over seven years.
The company began with little technology or AI, but gradually automated parts of the process after realising that manual credit work was slow, painful and vulnerable to human error when volumes increased.
AI now helps the company process large volumes of documentation, including bank statements, classify line items, understand patterns, generate reviews and perform calculations. This helps filter large volumes of incoming applications so that credit teams do not need to manually review every document set from the start.
But Hung was careful to stress that human judgement remains important. For larger financing amounts, Choco Up’s credit officers still review the case, ask questions and conduct qualitative analysis. The company may also meet business owners, either online or offline. For some cases, it still conducts site visits.
This balance between AI and human judgement is likely to define the future of SME financing. Technology can improve speed, pattern recognition and document analysis, but lending to smaller businesses still requires context. A restaurant, e-commerce brand, construction supplier and digital platform cannot all be understood through the same lens.
Choco Up also uses public information as part of its qualitative assessment. Hung said the company does some online scraping to identify available material on a company and look for major red flags before moving deeper into financials and bank statements.
Beyond Lending: An Ecosystem Play
While Choco Up’s current revenue model remains focused on deploying capital to help businesses grow, Hung said the company has long been helping SMEs with broader growth strategy.
Some businesses approach Choco Up without a CFO or finance lead. In such cases, the team may help review financials, identify areas for improvement or suggest fractional CFO support.
The company also helps businesses expanding across Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia by connecting them to ecosystem partners who can assist with incorporation, bank accounts, warehousing, logistics and marketing agencies. Hung said Choco Up does not currently charge for this because helping customers grow also improves their ability to repay safely.
This reveals the wider direction of Choco Up’s model. The company is not only a capital provider. It is gradually becoming a facilitator within the SME growth ecosystem.
Hung also said Choco Up helps investors, including high-net-worth individuals, family offices and funds, with transparent treasury management to generate a decent return. Over the long term, he expects the company may become more of a service provider when it reaches scale.
Raising Debt to Fund SME Growth
Choco Up’s capital base has also developed differently from many venture-backed fintech companies. Hung said the company has taken only one round of equity money, when it first started in 2019. Since then, it has raised significant debt from family offices and private credit funds to deploy capital to more companies. The next step, he said, will be to raise from institutions.
From an equity perspective, Choco Up is also considering a new fundraising round, which could help accelerate technology enhancement, market penetration and partnerships. Hung said the company does not have a complicated cap table, although he acknowledged that having a well-known investor on the cap table could also help.
The financing strategy reflects the dual nature of Choco Up’s business. It needs debt capital to lend to SMEs, but it may also need equity capital to build deeper technology capabilities and expand its partner network.
Becoming a Household Name for Business Help
Asked where he sees Choco Up five years from now, Hung said his ambition is for the company to become a household name in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.
He wants business owners who need working capital, trade financing or broader support to think instinctively of Choco Up as a place to go for help.
That ambition captures the company’s evolving identity. Choco Up began as a solution to a pain point experienced by its founders. It has since become a data-driven financing platform focused on asset-light, digitally enabled and growth-oriented SMEs.
Its next phase will depend on how well it can combine capital, technology, partnerships and trust. For Asia’s SMEs, the need is clear. Many businesses are too small, too young, too asset-light or too fast-moving for traditional lending models. Yet they require capital to fund inventory, marketing, expansion, supplier payments and new market entry.
Choco Up’s proposition is that modern SME financing should be faster, more data-informed, more sector-specific and more aligned with how businesses actually operate.
Hung’s own journey suggests that the future of SME finance will not be defined by technology alone. It will be defined by companies that understand the operating realities of founders, use data intelligently, manage risk responsibly and build ecosystems that help businesses grow beyond the loan itself.