[L-R] Laters.com co-founders Arvin Singh and Alex Yardley
For most travellers, the anxiety of booking a flight starts before the airport. A fare appears, the dates work, and then comes the harder question: can it be paid for today?
Laters.com, the Singapore-founded online travel agency previously known as Fly Fairly, is trying to build a business around that moment. The company has raised US$1.5 million in seed funding led by XBO Ventures, the investment arm of digital-asset platform XBO.com, while completing its rebrand from flyfairly.com to laters.com.
This round comes over a year after the firm acquired LFG, a social travel discovery engine known for its viral, Gen Z-focused user experience.
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The startup sells flights across more than 650 airlines and lets customers pay through over 100 methods, including digital wallets, cryptocurrencies, and around 40 buy-now-pay-later and instalment options. Its pitch is not that it has cheaper fares than everyone else, but that it gives travellers more ways to complete a booking once they find one.
That distinction matters in Southeast Asia, where online travel demand has returned strongly after the pandemic, but payment behaviour remains fragmented. Credit card penetration varies widely across the region, while wallets, bank transfers, instalment products and local payment rails often dominate daily spending. For travel platforms, that creates a gap: demand may exist, but checkout can still fail if customers cannot use their preferred payment method.
Laters.com says the majority of its payment volume is already non-card, which it describes as the inverse of much of the wider travel industry.
“Nobody should lose the fare they found because payday is two weeks away,” said Alex Yardley, founder and CEO of Laters.com. “Family, work, a wedding: some trips cannot wait. Laters.com fixes the price today and spreads the cost, so the people who plan ahead are not the ones who pay the most.”
From Fly Fairly to Laters.com
Laters.com launched from Singapore in August 2024 and says it has been profitable every month since February 2025. The company claims it is now on a run rate of more than one million travellers a year searching for flights on its platform. The United States has become its largest market, despite the company being headquartered in Singapore.
That geographic mix hints at the nature of the product. Buy now pay later, or BNPL, is well established in markets such as the US, Australia and parts of Europe, but Southeast Asia has also become an important testing ground for alternative payments. Players such as Atome, Kredivo, Grab, Shopee and others have trained consumers to split purchases into instalments, even as regulators keep a closer eye on consumer debt and transparency.
Flights are a particularly sharp use case because prices can move quickly and the ticket size is often much higher than a typical e-commerce purchase. Laters.com says customers using local and flexible payment methods book 35 per cent more often and spend 24 per cent more per booking than card users, citing a Stripe case study. It also says BNPL customers generate an average order value more than three times higher than card users.
Those figures explain why travel companies are paying closer attention to checkout design. In a market where customer acquisition costs are high and margins can be thin, a failed payment is not a minor technical issue. It can be the difference between a booked trip and a lost customer.
Crypto at checkout, not as a gimmick
The other part of Laters.com’s proposition is cryptocurrency. The platform accepts stablecoins and more than 70 other cryptocurrencies, settled at checkout like any other payment method. According to the company, crypto customers spend more than twice as much as the average customer, typically on long-haul trips and higher cabin classes.
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That does not mean crypto has become a mainstream way to buy airline tickets. In much of Southeast Asia, digital assets remain volatile, unevenly regulated and often associated more with trading than day-to-day payments. But stablecoins, which are designed to track the value of fiat currencies such as the US dollar, are increasingly being watched by fintech firms as a possible bridge between crypto users and practical spending.
For XBO Ventures, that appears to be the investment thesis.
“We back companies that turn digital assets into something people actually spend. Laters.com has done that at one of the sharpest points of friction there is: paying for a flight,” said Dor Maman, co-founder and CFO of XBO. “The majority of its volume already moves outside the card networks, and that is where we think this market is going.”
XBO Ventures has also backed payments infrastructure company Rapyd, participating in its US$500 million Series F round, according to the company’s notes to editors.
A crowded field, but a narrower wedge
Laters.com sits at the intersection of several competitive categories. In online travel, it faces large platforms such as Booking Holdings, Expedia Group, Agoda, Traveloka, Trip.com and AirAsia MOVE, many of which already offer flights and have deep supplier relationships. In flexible travel payments, companies such as Alternative Airlines have long promoted instalment options for flights, while Travala is known for allowing crypto payments across travel bookings.
In Southeast Asia, superapps and local travel platforms also have the advantage of distribution, loyalty programmes and embedded wallets.
Laters.com’s narrower wedge is payment breadth: instead of competing mainly on inventory or price, it is trying to become the travel checkout that adapts to how younger consumers already pay elsewhere.
Yardley’s background also reflects that mix of travel and commerce. Before founding Laters.com, he spent two decades across travel and e-commerce, including roles on eBay’s EMEA leadership team, as Senior Director at Booking Holdings leading partnerships for Agoda and Booking.com across Asia Pacific, and most recently as Managing Director at ShopBack.
The company is also publishing two free tools aimed at travellers navigating the fragmented pay-later market. One is a country-by-country guide to fly now pay later providers, covering options such as Klarna, Afterpay, Zip and Atome. The other is the Laters.com Payment Score, which rates pay-later providers available at checkout out of 10 based on repayment flexibility, interest rate, eligibility and approval process.
Laters.com says no provider pays to be scored, ranked or placed, and that it earns the same margin regardless of how a traveller pays. That claim will matter if the platform wants to be seen as a neutral guide rather than another checkout funnel.
The new funding will go towards brand growth, expansion of the core flight business, and new products and verticals. Yardley hinted that the company’s ambitions may stretch beyond travel.
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“Millennial and Gen Z travellers have spent a decade adapting to a booking experience built for their parents,” he said. “We built Laters.com around how this generation actually pays, and it turns out what we built works well beyond flights.”
For now, Laters.com is making a focused bet: that the next wave of online travel growth will not only come from more destinations or cheaper fares, but from giving travellers more control over how and when they pay.
The post Laters.com raises US$1.5M to expand flexible flight payments appeared first on e27.