When Clare Leighton and Christian Schneider co-founded fileAI in Singapore, they embarked on a mission to redefine business process automation. Their vision was to create a horizontal, AI-powered platform that could automate enterprise back-office workflows by structuring, verifying, and enriching data. Years later, this vision has materialized into a global company with customers in 18 countries and a team spread across eight.

In these two interviews—one with co-founder Clare Leighton in Singapore and the other with CEO and co-founder Christian Schneider at the New York Stock Exchange—the founders reflect on their journey. They discuss the evolution of their product, the challenges of global expansion, and the transformative power of agentic AI. These conversations offer a window into the strategic thinking that has propelled fileAI from a Southeast Asian startup to a global player in the AI automation space.

Key Themes in These Conversations

Several core themes emerge from these interviews, shedding light on fileAI’s philosophy and its approach to building a global AI company:

• The Horizontal Thesis: Clare and Christian both emphasize the importance of a horizontal platform. Instead of building siloed, vertical solutions for specific tasks, fileAI has focused on creating a set of core AI components that can be combined to automate a wide range of workflows across different departments and industries. This approach provides a unified, scalable solution for enterprises.
• Global Ambition from Day One: From its inception, fileAI was built with a global mindset. The founders discuss the advantages of starting in Singapore, a hub for global talent and a gateway to diverse markets. They also share their experiences expanding into the US and Europe, highlighting the importance of a nuanced, localized approach.
• The Agentic AI Revolution: Both founders see agentic AI as a once-in-a-generation shift, comparable to the impact of the cloud on infrastructure. They explain how agentic AI is democratizing technology and empowering businesses to automate complex processes with greater efficiency and lower costs.
• Navigating Complexity: Building a global AI company comes with its share of challenges, from navigating diverse regulatory landscapes to managing a remote, international team. Clare and Christian share their insights on how they’ve tackled these complexities, emphasizing the importance of trust, communication, and a unified mission.
• Building to Build, Not to Exit: The founders articulate a clear philosophy of building a sustainable, long-term business. They discuss their views on the exit landscape in Southeast Asia and their focus on execution and growth over short-term gains.

These interviews are part of the Southeast Asia Going Global series, produced by Insignia Ventures Partners and the New York Stock Exchange.

Part 1: Singapore with Clare, Co-Founder of fileAI

Reflecting on the Journey

Paulo: Before we talk about global expansion, let’s do a little bit of reflection over the last three or four years that you guys have been running the company. From the time that you and Christian decided to start fileAI to today, how has your perspective changed in terms of your mission and trying to help businesses automate? How much more challenging has it been? What are some of the learnings along the way?

Clare: fileAI is an AI-powered platform that automates enterprise back-office workflows by structuring, verifying, and enriching data sets to then automate downstream processes. The capability and technology at our disposal has evolved a long way since we started, but also the market dynamics and appetite for that kind of technology has changed.

We have built a lot of our AI components and models ourselves. When we started, we thought things like accuracy with proprietary models and new AI components for functionality were going to be the go-to-market driver. But really, in this part of the world and what we’ve learned over the years is that it’s about trust, compliance, and change management. We’re in highly regulated industries with very nuanced markets. So we have to have some kind of local humility and be ready to adapt to regulatory compliance and that kind of thing.

Navigating Regulatory Challenges

Paulo: Do you have a specific experience in any of the markets that you guys operate in of trying to navigate through that?

Clare: FSI—financial services and insurance—is one of our largest sectors. Obviously it’s heavily regulated and changes very much in each market. In particular, insurance is a large use case for us. So claims processing, for example, we support across five different countries in Southeast Asia. Each with their own language, currency, and regulatory piece.

So in Malaysia, for example, doing something like health claims, they have four sets of databases that you have to verify against for even the first line of adjudication, and that is all audited. So the compliance and regulatory piece for what is a very standard workflow for us looks completely different in Malaysia as it does in Singapore, as it does in Indonesia, Thailand, and so on.

Value of Singapore Headquarters

Paulo: Even as you guys have gone through different markets and obviously localized the product delivery in those markets, you guys are very much headquartered in Singapore. Maybe you can share a little bit of what has been the value for you guys setting up here as the base and in terms of not just fundraising, but also scaling out.

Clare: Being headquartered in Singapore and then scaling out from Southeast Asia first has done a couple of things for us. Singapore gives us great validation. It’s a great signal to investors that we have the rigor of the regulatory environment here in Singapore to scale out globally, but also gives us access to all of the very diverse Southeast Asian markets to stress-test our platform.

The fact that we can navigate highly regulated industries across so many disparate and varying requirements gives us a lot of confidence as we’ve been scaling now globally in the US and Europe, for example, where it’s a bit more standardized.

Leadership and Remote Operations

Paulo: Finally, with the different markets that you guys operate in, maybe you can share a little bit of how you’ve developed yourself as a leader. Obviously you came from Australia. And if I’m not mistaken, you operated fileAI the first few years totally remote, right? And you hadn’t even been able to meet your CEO Christian in person throughout that time. So how has your leadership approach evolved since then?

Clare: I think core to our approach is that we have been ambitious to be global from day one. So now we have customers in 18 countries and teams in eight of those. But as you pointed out, we started during the pandemic and it was two years before I actually got to sit in the room with my co-founder and CEO or any of our team.

By that point, obviously we had quite a bit underway in terms of team growth, product development, client growth, and traction. So it’s a very unique start. We definitely think about having a unified mission in terms of what we’re trying to solve for, but then empowering each of our teams and markets to have that localized approach, equipping them with the autonomy to go to market with local nuance and adapting the go-to-market strategy as needed.

Scaling and Global Expansion

Paulo: I also wanted to zoom out a little bit and talk about, I guess, as a company that is venture-backed and obviously you’re aware of the exit pathways out there. What do you think about that as a founder? And how has the global scale that fileAI is on right now impacted that view?

Clare: So at fileAI, we are definitely building to scale and grow. And eventually, potentially, we could list it as an exit if that’s on the cards. But definitely not looking at a trade sale. We have the attitude of building to build, not building to exit. I think historically this has been a tough market for exits out of Southeast Asia.

But we see that shifting as well. I think there’s a lot of growth frontier potential here in Southeast Asia. We see a lot more global investment and interest coming to this market. But for us, we focused on our execution and our global scale being what gives us that conviction to grow and build the thing, not sell the thing.

Future of Work and AI

Paulo: Obviously you guys are very much focused on building. And speaking of building, you guys have crossed a pretty significant milestone, especially from a product perspective of really making the platform that you guys have been running the past few years more public and more accessible to developers, especially with the API launch and then the MCP as well. How significant is this, and maybe especially for those who are not familiar, you can share a little bit of the significance of this and the role fileAI is playing in the broader future of work, right?

Clare: Absolutely. So as you said, the broader future of work—we see the shift to agentic AI being completely transformative, like a once-in-a-generation type of shift. And I think of it as likening to what cloud did for infrastructure, effort, and cost in starting and running companies, not just startups, but also enterprise. Agentic AI is doing the same thing for operational lift. So particularly in this part of the world, that equates to a lot of manpower, time, and also tooling and total cost of ownership for these kinds of tools to run these processes. So agentic AI massively flips the script on this.

How we’ve approached this, as you pointed out, is lots of launches and lots of internal development. We feel very strongly that the way to approach this is horizontally, rather than developing very specific point solutions that operate in their lane but cannot scale out. And therefore require a company to work with multiple vendors to solve problems across the organization. We have focused on building proprietary models and proprietary AI components that allow our users to construct these workflows.

You mentioned too, we recently launched our public platform. The other thing we’ve seen that I think is really important in this shift is that AI is democratizing technology procurement. AI literacy has leapt forward massively in the last couple of years. So rather than enterprise and companies just building from a C-suite, C-to-O top-down approach, everyone’s walking around with generative AI in their hand. So the expectation and literacy in these kinds of tools is very much bottom-up.

By opening up our platform to everyday users, builders, developers, even no-code builders and product owners, they can experience the automated data processing that we do, which is market-leading, and then pair that with the AI components to construct workflows. So they’re not relying on specialized enterprise agents. They’re not relying on these rigid tools and they don’t have the heavy development effort upfront just to get something off the ground.

What that means is if you’re starting a company as a startup, as a tech builder, or you’re an enterprise embarking on part of your AI journey, you can get a really quick ROI and then you can scale out across the organization. And that has a really flexible approach. It means you’re not locked in. We just think that an agentic piece is really transformative and it’s really important to attack it from a foundational level.

Multi-Use Case Applications

Paulo: So even within a single organization, you can use it for many different use cases across finance, across HR, across—

Clare: Absolutely. To give you an example, we do work primarily with FSI, but in a lot of related functions. So a bank, for example, might use fileAI for customer onboarding. You have a lot of supporting documentation that comes over email. We can do the email triage with agents. We can ingest and understand the contents of those emails, including KYC information.

Further on in different departments, you might have something like loan origination. Again, application forms and supporting documentation. We also need to call and look into other internal databases or proprietary databases that they own to reference, check, match, and compare and validate as part of that workflow.

That same set of components works in procurement where we’re matching and comparing between purchase orders and invoices and information that sits in an ERP. So for us, having the components that scale across is absolutely key.

US Market Expansion

Paulo: I wanted to zoom in a little bit into how fileAI is thinking about its US expansion, where a lot of effort is going into that at the moment. Especially coming from Southeast Asia, what have you guys had to learn that’s new when it comes to expansion in the US, especially since there’s a lot of AI companies already there and it’s a lot more mature compared to Southeast Asia?

Clare: Yeah. So I think some of the learnings here have definitely been transferrable. In that we’ve had to adapt to local markets here from day one. When we launched in the US more than a year ago and started building that pipeline and working with companies over there, it wasn’t that we were doing our first expansion or learning about a new market every day of our operation. We’ve been working with multiple different markets, so we’re having to adapt and apply that same nuanced approach.

So for us, it was in some ways just another market. In some ways a little less complex, thankfully. But as you pointed out, it’s a lot more competitive in terms of the AI space. But that has really worked as tailwinds in our favor. The literacy and understanding of AI and its capabilities and applications really has helped us shortcut some of these enterprise conversations. Also with investors, as we think about raising and scaling, it has helped bridge the gap between the opportunity and how the technology we have today will be used in years to come.

Horizontal vs. Vertical Solutions

Paulo: And I think the fact that the market education is already there in the market actually makes a lot of the solutions a lot more vertical than horizontal, which I guess plays in your favor to some extent.

Clare: Exactly. There’s no shortage of really vertical solutions and specialized agents. However, an enterprise, like a bank that I mentioned in one department, might have 20 core processes. And then if I look at 10 different departments, you’ve got 200 workflows right there. They do not want to work across 200 vendors for each of those processes.

Enterprise wants a uniform approach to quality, security, data governance, privacy, and cost and quality controls as well. So we can come to a market where they have the AI literacy and use of AI agents. And they’ve been through those procurement processes before. We’ve also deployed before in highly regulated industries. And then we can marry that with a universal horizontal approach that helps them just do what they’re doing more efficiently.

Advice for Founders

Paulo: Any advice for founders that are watching this that are thinking about also scaling globally, especially to the US for example?

Clare: Yeah, I think so much advice to founders. I think you’ve said everything. But I think advice to founders—so often when I’ve spoken with other groups of founders and people earlier on in their journey, we talk about doing the unscalable things early. And while that is still true, I think what AI is doing and what agentic AI in particular can do for founders is like your shortcut to a scaling team.

You’re no longer hiring for scale. You can achieve much greater efficiency using these tools. So you should be thinking about how you scale more aggressively, much sooner, rather than thinking about it step by step.

Co-Founder’s Perspective

Paulo: And finally, since your co-founder Christian is here, maybe you can share a little bit of what it’s like to work with him and yeah, especially from having been building this together for three or four years now. Yeah. Maybe you could share a little bit of how you guys met and how the working relationship as co-founders has been.

Clare: Sure. And as you pointed out at the start of the interview, it’s been very unique. So we actually met in a previous venture that was scaling out of Singapore into Australia. So Christian and I had worked between Singapore and Sydney remotely for a number of years before we started with fileAI. That was a great foundation because we did start completely remote. We went in the same room for the first two years of building the company, which is pretty unique looking back at it.

But I think the inherent trust and understanding of how we work and understanding what we assess in decision-making is really important. So I think ages ago I gave this response in an interview, which was: you have to know what your co-founder will think about making a decision when you are not in the room. Because I don’t have to chime in, but if I understand his thought process and I trust that, like that’s a really great foundation.

And then in terms of working together now, we cover a number of different markets. We are still heavily involved in sales. There’s a lot of founder-led sales as part of our traction. Going to new markets, in particular, we don’t think it’s reasonable to just send a team out and expect them to achieve what we have not. So we are really on the front lines with our go-to-market and expansion. Working with clients on sales, delivery, partnerships, and having teams in eight countries and customers in 18—that’s a lot of ground to cover.

So for us, being able to divide and conquer some of those markets so that we have a C-suite and founder presence in some really meaningful conversations is very helpful.

Part 2: New York with Christian Schneider, CEO and Co-Founder of fileAI

Kristen: At the NYSE, we are highlighting innovative companies through our Southeast Asia Going Global series. fileAI is one company making moves, and I’m pleased to be joined by its CEO and co-founder Christian Schneider. Christian, welcome.

Christian: Thanks for having me.

Kristen: It’s great to have you here at the Stock Exchange. For viewers who are watching, what can you tell them about fileAI?

Christian: fileAI is a company that is working on business process automation. Being based in Asia is for us a very good starting point because most of the world’s business processes are actually outsourced to Asia in general. So we’re using that base as a foundation for building a global company. We build FileAI components to work with large enterprises to automate their mundane day-to-day tasks.

Expanding to the US Market

Kristen: I’m curious about the travel that you’ve been making. I see trips across the Pacific recently from Singapore to the US. What brings fileAI from Singapore and Southeast Asia to the United States?

Christian: The United States is the biggest AI enterprise market in the world right now, and we see thousands of opportunities here with customers. At the same time, we work with BPO partners who automate processes for American businesses. That’s a very good place to be for us. We have so much opportunity here. At the same time, we understand there’s a lot of investment going into this space, mostly driven by the US, and so of course we see that opportunity as well.

Kristen: What makes the US an attractive market for fileAI?

Christian: Just looking at the enterprise readiness to adopt AI—that is very much advanced here. And yeah, we are very excited about talking to the businesses here. Our company focuses on the basics: data preparation. And that is usually where we want to start our conversations with businesses here.

Kristen: What are some of the biggest use cases that you see for fileAI in the US?

Christian: Yeah, so we have done a lot with enterprises on data preparation workflows, specifically for data transparency. So they can actually build AI on top of that. And so we do a lot in finance and accounting, insurance, and also banking when we help large enterprises to be ready for the AI revolution.

Advantages of Singapore Base

Kristen: What advantages does building from Singapore bring to the AI space for a company like yours making headway here in America?

Christian: Absolutely. So as I said, we are in the hotspot of business process automation and outsourcing in Asia. So we have access to markets like India, Philippines, and the likes. We can talk to the businesses who are actually doing that outsourcing work on the ground. This gives us a very good advantage to understand the workflow and the processes within those companies. That’s number one.

Number two is that Singapore is a very competitive market. It may not always look like that from the outside, but there is a lot of influence in Singapore from tech global powerhouses in the world. We have, of course, the US. We have China. We have India to a certain extent. And that gives us also a very good, healthy competition in our home market.

Now we are headquartered in the US right now, so we are actually based here. At the same time, though, we still have a lot of our team based in Singapore.

Challenges of Scaling Globally

Kristen: What is the toughest challenge of scaling a global company?

Christian: So I think there are a lot of challenges, but at the same time, most companies nowadays are global from day one. There’s a lot of talent everywhere in the world, and we of course want to tap into that talent. There is a war for AI talent here in the US specifically, and so we have a chance to also tap into resources in Asia and even in Europe.

So we see ourselves as having an advantage being global from day one rather than as a disadvantage.

Future of Data Processing and Engineering

Kristen: What excites you about the future of data processing and engineering?

Christian: I think the most exciting and important point is that we see this data processing component as becoming a product in itself. Right now, a lot of enterprises are still looking for point solutions. They’re still figuring out RAG versus context engineering versus X, Y, Z. We are trying to productize the whole pipeline, and we would like to sell and ship it to enterprises that way.

This will allow us to commoditize this industry much faster and bring businesses to where they actually want to be—focusing their efforts on moving the needle for their internal KPIs rather than looking at point solutions somewhere in the middle of the process.

Kristen: How can more efficient data pipelines help with the sheer amount of energy that it takes to power this and make AI systems better?

Christian: That’s really what we’re trying to do: better data, better context for AI, and of course, packaging it all nicely. It has to run in an operational environment and has to be production ready. Doing a demo or POC is nice and good. However, if there are millions of transactions running through the pipelines, that has to be supported. And we are at the forefront of this. We have done over 200 enterprise implementations, especially on the data processing side.

Agentic AI and Workflow Automation

Kristen: How does agentic AI transform the way that tech companies are built and expand?

Christian: I think it’s a super transformative component in itself. Having the ability to simultaneously tap into and access a lot of different sources of data—that is fantastic. We have to be careful that we have set up the pipelines correctly. I think that is really what we’re sitting at. We want to make sure that we can feed agentic components or even agents directly, and then of course we will build specific agentic pieces ourselves.

So we are quite excited about these pieces taking over some of that mundane task and work that we’re doing on a day-to-day basis.

Kristen: How do you see workflow automation impacting capital markets?

Christian: It’s basically very similar to it impacting any other enterprise. I think everything is now faster. It can also become, in a certain sense, simultaneous. Whereas usually we would think about a workflow in sequence, now we’re breaking that up altogether. Yeah, and so that is really exciting.

I think for capital markets, there is a massive opportunity in the data preparation side of things, also tapping into alternative data much faster, which usually is a process. But it can now become a real-time push of a button, for example. So that’s what we see for capital markets.

Kristen: Any use cases that you can share in the industry?

Christian: Yeah, I’d say data gathering and just basically keeping the data pipes up and running all the time is something that we feel is new. Unstructured data is still very hard to get by, so we really commoditize that part and we help businesses to tap into the data instantly.

AI Transformation in East Asia

Kristen: Christian, what’s the reality or perhaps even a hard truth of driving AI transformation for enterprise, especially in East Asia where your company started?

Christian: Yeah, so for us, we look at the process as a zero-to-one problem. We see 87 steps that are fulfilled usually either manually or with inefficient automation tools right now. And so we’re coming in to support that process directly. That could be in terms of different AI components working together. This could also be the end-to-end process. But the reality that we see is what was pushed in the past—that there is an agent, a super agent that can take it as a top-down approach and just automate and make the problem go away.

That is not what we see is actually the reality on the ground. We see there are a lot of companies struggling with getting from zero to one, and that is the gap that we would like to bridge first before we go into agentic or even AI in general.

Kristen: How has your perspective changed over the years since starting the company?

Christian: Yeah, so very much, as I said, it’s definitely not a silver bullet approach. I think we see that many companies are realizing that right now, and there are a couple of options now for how to approach this. And we hope that a zero-to-one vendor like us could be a very good alternative. Of course, we see other companies going straight to work with Palantir or other large companies who then forward deploy engineers to tackle the problem the same way.

But it is a validation for us in our approach rather than the top-down approach.

Go-to-Market Strategy and Resource Allocation

Kristen: I’m curious in terms of how this impacts fileAI’s go-to-market strategy and the way that you allocate resources.

Christian: Definitely. For us, the go-to-market is that we are running that split approach. We would like to talk to the enterprise directly, absolutely. At the same time, we would like to talk to the BPOs. We’d like to talk to the partners who are actually currently fulfilling these workflows.

We would not know how to understand how they actually solve these very complex problems. They may in itself not be very difficult to understand, but if you string them together, it is a very complex problem to solve. And that is true for an AI agent the same way that is true for a human right now.

Global Talent and Competitive Advantage

Kristen: What does it mean for fileAI to be headquartered in Singapore as a global company?

Christian: So we are very excited about that part. We have access to global talent. We also have access to the US market. A lot of the US players are playing a very big game in the Asia market right now. And yeah, we see that it’s actually an advantage for us. And now being here in the US, I’m very excited about that opportunity, of course.

Kristen: How does it provide a competitive advantage to companies when it comes to fundraising and scaling?

Christian: So scaling-wise, I think we’ve always had our sights on the global markets. Of course, that includes the US, but it also includes Asia as a whole and even Europe. So that was always clear to us.

For talent, we have great talent in Asia. At the same time, we’re able now to tap into talent in the US as well. So I think for us it’s actually a benefit having both markets as a source at the same time. Yeah, I think that’s also true for many companies nowadays.

Exit Strategies and Scaling Impact

Kristen: And what are your views on the exit landscape for companies that are headquartered in Southeast Asia today?

Christian: Yeah, so we’re in the enterprise space and especially in enterprise AI, which is where we play a big role. We see our exit strategy leaning a bit more towards the US market just because it’s the most mature market.

I think for other Asian businesses that may be very different depending on which category and industry they’re in. In the B2C environment, for example, Asia is a great market with a lot of users. And yeah, there might be other options for access.

Kristen: How has that impacted your approach to scaling the company?

Christian: It’s definitely been a bit more important for us to have a presence in this market here, make sure that we talk to the customers directly. I’m doing that every day. My team’s doing that every day. And of course then investor discussions are also happening mostly here in the US, so we’re quite excited about that part.

Managing a Global Company

Kristen: Now at the helm of a global company, you obviously work with leaders across different markets. What’s your approach to managing that level of complexity?

Christian: Hiring for a global startup is surely a challenge. It is a challenge for everybody. For us, I think we have put a lot of effort into starting with hiring at the beginning, bottoms-up, bringing in good talent that can help us build. At the same time, we always had a lens on how to build this international team? How can we bring in people who’ve been managing people globally before? And so that’s really been our strategy. It’s worked out okay for us so far. I think we’re doing really well, growing really strongly. And we are currently doing that same thing here in the US, bringing on those leadership teams that we need.

Kristen: How are you able to get everyone across the globe and as a relatively young company on the same page and united on the mission?

Christian: We’re a super agile company from day one. This is actually a term that comes from the engineering side of things, I’ll say. But we operate that way throughout the company. We have a very low hierarchy in the company. We are all talking constantly, and I think rapid communication is really important for a global company.

There cannot be gaps in between the teams. That will really cripple our efforts.

Agent Workflows in Startups

Kristen: How do you see agent workflows transforming the way that startups are built?

Christian: So of course you can shortcut a lot of things with agentic workflows within your business. We, for example, have started prototyping product features mostly with agentic platforms just because it’s much faster, cheaper, and also it does not actually require the same amount of resources that it used to require.

So I think it’s part and parcel. If we’re selling AI, we also need to know how to use AI. I think that’s very clear.

Kristen: Christian Schneider, CEO and co-founder of fileAI, joining us here at the Stock Exchange today. Christian, thank you.