Handshake Finance Raises S$500K Pre-Seed to Build Escrow-as-a-Service for Singapore's High-Trust Service Industries

Born From Personal Experience

Handshake Finance launched in September 2025, founded by Christopher Chan and Lee Jun Xian. Both had seen the trust gap up close.

Jun's close friend lost S$80,000 in pre-payments to a renovation company that collapsed mid-project. At the same time, Christopher's friend paid a deposit on a rental home she had never viewed, only to discover the listing was fraudulent. Both incidents pointed to the same structural failure: in service industries, someone always carries the risk, and when trust breaks down, there is little recourse on either side.

The two founders met as university classmates in London and returned to the problem with complementary backgrounds. Christopher Chan had spent his career in fintech, designing compliant payment flows on regulated infrastructure. Lee Jun Xian came from venture capital, with experience scaling early-stage companies from zero to one.

Trust as the foundation, not the feature

Handshake operates on bank-grade payment infrastructure provided by MAS-regulated partners. All payment flows are fully MAS regulated, and funds are held with DBS in segregated escrow accounts. For the founders, this is not a checkbox -- it is the entire foundation of the business.

"We are trying to solve a structural trust gap in service industries. But before any of that, our users have to trust us," said Christopher Chan, Co-Founder of Handshake Finance. "Making sure every fund flow is fully compliant, and that our users feel completely assured handing us money in what are often life-changing transactions, is our number one priority. Everything else is built on top of that."

Closing the Trust Gap Across Service Industries

Every high-trust service transaction carries the same structural flaw: either the customer pays before work is done, or the provider works before getting paid. Someone always carries the risk. Across industries -- from renovation and interior design to event planning, creative agencies, and professional services -- that risk falls entirely on one side, and when trust breaks down, there is little recourse for either party.

Handshake Finance was built to close that gap. The platform holds customer funds in escrow and releases them to service providers against agreed milestones, giving buyers protection from pre-payment risk while giving service providers the confidence to deliver. The model is designed to work across any service industry where the payment trust problem exists.

Why Renovation and Interior Design Is Handshake's Beachhead Market

Renovation was where the structural failure ran deepest. The industry operates with no mandatory licensing or regulatory framework. Anyone can set up as an interior designer with no accreditation required, leaving homeowners with no reliable way to assess accountability before signing a contract.

There is no standard payment framework either. Homeowners routinely pay up to 50% of the total project value upfront, with funds going directly to the interior designer before any work begins. If a project stalls or a firm shuts down, there is limited protection and recourse. At the other end of the project, interior designers face the opposite problem: the final handover payment, where homeowners hold most of the leverage, can be withheld over disputes that wipe out up to half a project's margin.

Eight Months of Listening Before a Single Line of Code

Before writing any software, the Handshake team spent eight months speaking with more than 80 interior designers and homeowners across Singapore to understand the real frictions on both sides of the transaction. What they found reinforced the decision to start here: high transaction values, a broken payment norm, an unregulated supply side, and no existing platform that protected both parties.

That research shaped how the product was built. After a renovation contract is signed, Handshake's AI automatically generates the transaction structure with line items, payment schedules, and sub-milestones set out clearly to remove ambiguity. Homeowners place funds into escrow rather than paying upfront directly to the interior designer.

Payment releases to the designer as work progresses against agreed milestones, with sub-milestone releases providing faster cashflow access without compromising homeowner protection. The platform also replaces the manual spreadsheet-based back-office admin most interior design firms still run, and offers complimentary mediation and independent assessments in the event of a dispute.

More than 40 Interior Design Companies Onboarded and 2 Major Partnerships Signed

Handshake now has more than 40 interior design companies onboarded. The company has signed partnerships with Renonation.sg and Network SG, two of Singapore's most established renovation marketplaces, to drive awareness and adoption across the broader ecosystem.

"It is an incredible feeling to see this much support behind us, and we are excited about what is ahead," said Lee Jun Xian, Co-Founder of Handshake Finance. "We are industry-agnostic by design, but we are laser-focused on fixing renovation first. The scams that are still everyday occurrences in this space need to go, and the transactional experience for everyone involved needs to be better before we turn our attention to the next industry or market."

Homeowners and interior designers can learn more or request access at handshake.finance.


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About Handshake Finance

Handshake Finance is a Singapore-based fintech building escrow-as-a-service infrastructure for high-trust service industries. The platform holds customer funds in segregated escrow accounts and releases them against agreed milestones, protecting buyers from pre-payment risk while giving service providers the confidence to deliver. All payment flows are fully MAS regulated. Funds are held with DBS. Handshake is currently focused on Singapore's renovation and interior design market as its beachhead, with plans to expand across other service industries and Southeast Asia.