SMBC, Singtel Innov8 Back fileAI as Corporate VCs Dive below Foundation Models

Singapore-based fileAI has secured investment from SMBC Asia Rising Fund and Singtel Innov8, adding two corporate venture investors with large banking and telecommunications ecosystems to a company building the data and workflow infrastructure enterprises need to put artificial intelligence into production. The deal comes as corporate AI investment starts spreading beyond the costly race to build foundation models.

SMBC Asia Rising Fund is the corporate venture capital fund of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation. Singtel Innov8 is Singtel Group’s corporate venture arm. The two have now appeared together in at least three enterprise AI financings since November. These deals include WIZ.AI’s Series B, Whale’s $40 Mn Series C3 extension and fileAI.

The value, stake, valuation and funding stage of the August 27 transaction were not disclosed. According to fileAI, the capital will support its expansion in Japan, including setting up a local team spanning sales, engineering and customer success. The money raised will also deepen its financial services capabilities. The company frames the investment as strengthening its standing as an Asian contender in a still-forming global enterprise AI market.

The announcement coincides with the debut of fileScout, a product designed to map unstructured enterprise data before deeper AI processing.

fileAI Deal and Funding Snapshot

• Latest Investors: SMBC Asia Rising Fund, Singtel Innov8
• Deal Value, Stage, Stake and Valuation: Undisclosed
• Use of Capital: Japan expansion and building deeper financial services capabilities
• Japan Entry: June 2026 through JRE Ventures partnership and strategic investment
• Operating Scale: More than 1 Bn files processed, per company disclosures
• Last Disclosed Funding Total: Just over $20 Mn cumulative as of February 2025, following a $14 Mn round announced that month, per company disclosures. Subsequent strategic investment amounts have not been disclosed, and fileAI’s 2024–25 financing announcements do not reconcile cleanly enough to calculate a newer cumulative total.

The Business below the Model

For fileAI, the problem starts with the files themselves. Contracts, invoices, spreadsheets, financial statements and other corporate records are often fragmented across formats and systems.

Its fileForge platform extracts, structures, validates, matches and reconciles that information before it moves into downstream workflows. The company says its platform unifies data capture, preparation, governance and orchestration into auditable workflows based on standard operating procedures. It also emphasises that the platform provides the structure, validation and traceability necessary for agentic AI to function effectively in production environments, rather than just in testing scenarios.

In essence, fileScout first maps what a file contains to isolate relevant information before more expensive AI processing, an approach the company says can sharply reduce token costs. Paired with automated capture, validation, matching and reconciliation, fileAI says its output is clean and audit-ready records are published directly into the systems large organisations already run on. fileAI describes the underlying pipeline as its third-generation processing architecture.

Christian Schneider, chief executive officer of fileAI, said in the investment announcement that “AI will become an operating layer for every major enterprise”, arguing that such a layer cannot be built on fragmented data, unreliable outputs or endlessly expanding computing costs. fileAI’s stated ambition is to build a global enterprise AI leader from Asia and help the region’s businesses become the world’s most AI-enabled organisations.

Large language models, or LLMs, may be getting better, but enterprise systems still need accurate information before software agents can be trusted to act.

That problem becomes sharper in banking, insurance, procurement and compliance, where extracting a number or clause is only one step. Organisations also have to validate information, reconcile conflicting records and retain enough visibility over a process to understand how an output was produced.

Its claim to scale has grown substantially as the business has expanded. In February 2025, when fileAI announced its $14 Mn funding, it said it was processing more than 200 Mn files annually. By June 2025, it reported operations across more than 18 countries, over 200 system integrations and 250+ active clients.

By the end of that year, the company said it had crossed 1 Bn files processed cumulatively across finance, insurance, supply chains, healthcare and core business operations. It also named MS&AD, Toshiba, PwC, KPMG, Nippon Paint and Keppel among its key customers.

That is the commercial bet behind fileScout. Processing every page and every field through increasingly capable models can become expensive at enterprise volumes. Mapping the file first and deciding what needs deeper processing is one way to control costs. However, fileAI has not disclosed independent benchmarks for the token savings it claims.

Enterprise AI Moves Past the Pilot

The wider market is beginning to create demand for that infrastructure. In a February report, McKinsey, working with the Singapore Economic Development Board and Tech in Asia, surveyed 330 senior executives across six markets and found that 46% of Southeast Asian companies had moved beyond AI pilots to scaling them, against a global average of 35%. High performers were twice as likely to fundamentally redesign how work gets done rather than layer AI onto existing processes.

Yet deployment remains uneven. Deloitte’s July survey of 74 CFOs across Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam found that 46% reported pockets of AI use across their organisations, only 12% described adoption as extensive and another 36% planned to implement it. Within finance functions, just 4% reported extensive use.

The barriers those CFOs identified are the ones fileAI claims to solve. About 53% cited cost or resource requirements, 50% cited talent or skills gaps and 43% cited data issues among those surveyed. Only 30% said AI was already delivering value in line with expectations or exceeding those.

Singapore presents a separate, broader enterprise-level picture. AI adoption among non-SMEs rose to 62.5% in 2024 from 44% a year earlier, according to the Infocomm Media Development Authority, while adoption among SMEs increased to 14.5% from 4.2%. The national AI impact programme launched in March this year aims to support 10,000 enterprises over three years.

Among AI-using firms, 84% rely on off-the-shelf generative AI tools, 52% use domain-specific solutions and 44% use customised or proprietary AI. Off-the-shelf generative AI remains the most common form of adoption, although substantial shares of firms are also using domain-specific and customised or proprietary AI tools.

As that adoption deepens, the contest is widening from who has the most capable model to who can make AI work reliably and economically inside an organisation. Data quality, integration, governance and processing costs become harder to ignore once experiments turn into recurring workflows.

Corporate Capital with a Deployment Angle

The $200 Mn SMBC Asia Rising Fund was established in Singapore in April 2023 by Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Incubate Fund, one of Japan’s larger seed and early-stage VCs. It has a 10-year investment period and supports high-potential startups across India, Southeast Asia and global markets to accelerate business development and strategic partnerships with the SMBC Group. Its original target areas included lending technology, payments, supply-chain finance, banking-as-a-service and digital assets.

That mandate makes fileAI’s financial services push particularly relevant. The company is targeting processes ranging from financial statement and covenant extraction to know-your-customer (KYC) and onboarding checks, reconciliation and regulatory reporting across large, multi-entity organisations.

Mayoran Rajendra, managing director of SMBC’s AI transformation department, said in the investment announcement that the group was pursuing its own digitalisation and AI transformation while seeing growing demand from enterprises trying to extract value from large volumes of unstructured documents.

He believes fileAI’s ability to improve data accessibility, operational efficiency and decision-making will become increasingly important as AI use expands. SMBC will explore practical AI applications with fileAI and other leading organisations across various industries.

Singtel Innov8 operates with a similarly strategic brief. Established in 2010, the corporate venture arm manages a $250 Mn general-purpose evergreen fund and a separate $250 Mn AI growth fund launched this March.

The newer vehicle targets growth-stage companies in customer engagement, network operations, cybersecurity, IT automation, horizontal enterprise AI platforms and vertical-specific AI solutions. The fileAI announcement does not identify which Innov8 vehicle invested in the company.

Innov8 says its initial cheques typically run between $1 Mn and $5 Mn, sized against how strategically relevant a company is to Singtel Group. The point is the reach behind that cheque. Singtel operates across 20 countries in Asia, Australia and Africa with a combined reach of more than 839 Mn mobile customers. Innov8 describes its role as helping start-ups move beyond their home markets by drawing on that footprint.

Boon Ping Chua, managing director (investments), Asia Pacific, at Singtel Innov8, said fileAI is building a specialised platform to address an ongoing challenge in enterprise data management. He emphasised the growing need to convert complex, unstructured information into clean, structured data that enterprises can trust and use at scale.

Strategic Investor Profile

SMBC Asia Rising Fund

Capital base: $200 Mn. Structure: Corporate VC established by SMBC and Incubate Fund in April 2023, 10-year investment period. Focus: High-potential start-ups across India, Southeast Asia and global markets, with potential for SMBC business collaboration. fileAI fit: Banking, regulated enterprises and financial workflows.

Singtel Innov8

Capital base: $250 Mn evergreen fund plus $250 Mn AI growth fund. Structure: Singtel corporate venture arm, established in 2010. Typical initial cheque: $1 Mn to $5 Mn. Group footprint: 20 countries, more than 839 Mn mobile customers. fileAI fit: Enterprise AI, automation and potential corporate deployment channels.

Innov8’s portfolio already shows evidence of the link between venture investment and corporate deployment.

When WIZ.AI raised tens of millions of dollars in its Series B in November 2025, SMBC Asia Rising Fund led the round and existing investor Singtel Innov8 also took part. Sharan Makhija, senior director of investments at Innov8, said at the time that WIZ.AI’s voice technology had been adopted with good outcomes across a range of use cases within the Singtel Group.

The two investors crossed paths again in July when Singapore-headquartered Whale raised a $40 Mn Series C3 extension, taking its Series C funding to $100 Mn. CMB International and SMBC Asia Rising Fund led the extension, with Singtel Innov8, Krungsri Finnovate, Hyundai Motor Group and Charisma Partners among the participants. Whale is building an AI operating system that connects information from cameras, sensors and audio with enterprise workflows.

The same names keep coming up. Rajendra spoke for SMBC during the Whale extension in July and again on fileAI in August. Krungsri Finnovate, which backed fileAI’s second fundraising round in June 2025, also joined the Whale round. WIZ.AI, Whale and fileAI all sit on Innov8’s published portfolio.

The overlap does not establish a coordinated investment strategy between SMBC and Singtel. It does, however, show corporate capital repeatedly turning towards companies whose AI products are closer to business operations than model layers.

In June, fileAI entered Japan through a partnership with JRE Ventures, the corporate venture arm supporting innovation across JR East Group. JRE Ventures also agreed to make an undisclosed strategic investment. The companies also said they would explore deployments using governed AI agents to digitise and restructure legacy contracts and operational documents within JR East Group companies.

From Bluesheets to fileAI

Schneider and Clare Leighton founded the business as Bluesheets in 2020, initially focussing on financial data processing and workflow automation. A $4 Mn pre-Series A led by Insignia Ventures Partners in June 2022, with 1982 Ventures, Antler, Kistefos and Plug and Play APAC participating, brought total funding to $5.7 Mn at the time.

The company raised a $6.5 Mn Series A led by Illuminate Financial in January 2024, when Forbes reported total funding of $12.5 Mn and a $30 Mn valuation. It subsequently broadened its positioning beyond financial data automation and became fileAI, although the legal entity remains registered as Bluesheets Pte Ltd.

In February 2025, fileAI announced $14 Mn in Series A funding from Illuminate Financial, Antler Elevate, Insignia Ventures Partners and Heinemann Group, saying that the financing brought total funds raised to just over $20 Mn.

Its subsequent disclosures make the precise round history harder to reconstruct. Krungsri Finnovate said in June 2025 that its investment through Finnoventure Trust formed part of fileAI’s second fundraising of approximately $8 Mn, naming several of the same investors involved in the February announcement. The figures are, therefore, not independent rounds.

That is also why the latest investment matters despite the absence of a disclosed cheque or new valuation. JRE Ventures has given the company an entry point into Japan’s rail and infrastructure ecosystem. SMBC brings banking and relationships with regulated enterprises. And Singtel Innov8 sits within a telecommunications and digital infrastructure group, implying robust distribution.

The next test for fileAI is whether those corporate relationships can turn into repeatable commercial use, at a company whose scale claims, customer list and cost savings currently rest on its own disclosures rather than independent benchmarks.

For SMBC Asia Rising Fund and Singtel Innov8, after WIZ.AI, Whale and now fileAI, the stronger measure of their enterprise AI bets will similarly be whether portfolio technology makes the jump from investment committee to operating workflow.