MONTREAL — Clearco is hiring for an expansion into Germany, Switzerland and Austria, and hiring staff in Singapore, as it starts investing the more than US$500 million it raised in two funding rounds earlier this year.

The Toronto-based fintech is hiring an executive based in Germany to oversee the company’s efforts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and German-speaking salespeople to work from its Dublin office, according to a series of active job postings.

“We’re looking to make a bigger impact on the world by helping thousands of German founders win,” reads the job posting for the Germany-based position. “As the Head of DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), you will be responsible for accelerating Clearco’s expansion across the region and will own critical financial, business, and product goals.”

The company is also looking for business-development staff in Singapore. An expansion there would mark Clearco’s first foray into Southeast Asia, an increasingly important e-commerce market. 

Clearco currently has operations in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands. At the time of its most recent fundraising round, Clearco co-founders Michele Romanow and Andrew D’Souza said the company was eyeing further expansion in Europe and Asia later this year, but it has not announced any specific markets. Clearco didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In an interview with The Logic earlier this month, D’Souza said that when deciding whether to enter a new country, Clearco evaluates factors such as entrepreneurs’ access to venture capital, the state of the e-commerce market and whether regulations enable the company to execute its business plan.

“Every market is a little bit unique,” Romanow said at the time. “We need a unique regulation path, we need to find and build a community of founders in those places, but it’s one of the reasons we’ve raised so much equity dollars.”

Clearco, which changed its name from Clearbanc in April to reflect its growing suite of products, is flush with cash after two large fundraising rounds earlier this year. It raised US$350 million in a Series C round in April that valued the company at nearly US$2 billion. That round was followed by another US$215-million round in July, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, marking the first Canadian investment by one of the world’s largest and most influential tech investors.

Clearco’s core product gives e-commerce companies access to loans ranging from US$10,000 to US$10 million. The company uses a proprietary algorithm that analyzes applicants’ finances and determines how much to offer, a process that is designed to be easier than traditional loan applications. In exchange, Clearco takes a flat percentage of its portfolio companies’ revenue.

Clearco also offers a number of other services to help its customers grow their businesses, including ClearInsights, which gives companies access to data about other firms in their industries, and ClearMatch, which recommends potential business partnerships for Clearco’s portfolio companies.

Germany is Europe’s third-largest e-commerce market, with a total of almost $140 billion in business-to-consumer e-commerce in 2019, a report from J.P. Morgan says. The DACH region in general has been an active market for startup investments, with a record amount of venture capital flowing to Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2020, according to European tech publication Sifted.eu. The area also gave rise to e-commerce giants such as Otto Group and Zalando, the latter of which has a market cap of more than $36 billion.

Singapore’s e-commerce sector is less established, but growing quickly, and the Singaporean government is taking steps to turn the city-state into a hub for online shopping in Asia. Forty million people in Southeast Asia began using the internet in 2020, for a total of 400 million, up from just 260 million five years earlier, according to a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company.

Gross merchandise value for e-commerce in Southeast Asia was US$62 billion in 2020, a figure that is expected to rise to US$172 billion in 2025, according to the report. Singapore, in particular, has enabled much of the region’s growth, the report states, housing regional headquarters for e-commerce unicorns such as Lazada and Sea Group.

Meanwhile, Singapore’s government has signed a partnership with Google that would help workers learn skills to take on jobs in the digital economy. “E-commerce in Southeast Asia—it’s surging,” Ben King, country director at Google Singapore, told CNBC last month. “But what sets Singapore apart [is] its policies and its initiatives that help cultivate an environment for the digital industry and the digital economy to thrive.”