Joel Long

Joel Long and the Rise of ShopBack: Building Asia’s Leading Cashback Ecosystem

Founded in 2014 in Singapore, ShopBack began with a simple idea: to make everyday shopping more rewarding for consumers across Asia-Pacific. Co-founded by Joel Long alongside Henry Chan, Josephine Chow, and Shanru Lai, the platform was inspired by successful cashback models in the United States and Europe—but built specifically for Southeast Asian consumers and merchants.

As Co-Founder, Joel Long has played a pivotal role in shaping ShopBack’s technology and product infrastructure—ensuring that the platform could scale seamlessly across diverse markets. What started as a prototype developed over a weekend quickly evolved into one of the region’s most prominent consumer rewards ecosystems. Within just a year of its launch, ShopBack expanded beyond Singapore into Malaysia and the Philippines, marking its first regional footprint.

Over the following years, the company continued its rapid expansion into Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Australia, while processing its first million transactions and awarding more than SGD$500,000 in cashback to users by 2016. In 2018, ShopBack entered Australia and acquired personal finance platform Seedly—signaling its ambition to evolve beyond a cashback platform into a broader financial services ecosystem.

ShopBack’s growth has also been fueled by strong investor confidence. The company raised US$45 million in 2019 from investors including Rakuten Capital and EV Growth, followed by an extended US$75 million funding round in 2020 led by Temasek. By 2022, ShopBack secured an additional US$80 million in Series F funding, bringing its total capital raised to over US$230 million.

Today, ShopBack serves more than 60 million shoppers across 13 markets and powers over US$5.5 billion in annual sales for more than 20,000 merchant partners—facilitating over half a million transactions daily. Under Joel Long’s leadership in product innovation, the company has also expanded into financial services through offerings such as ShopBack Pay, reinforcing its mission to make shopping more accessible, rewarding, and financially empowering for consumers across the region.