SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 3 June 2026 - Handshake Finance, the Singapore-based fintech company building escrow-as-a-service infrastructure for high-trust service industries, has closed a S$500,000 pre-seed funding round. The capital will accelerate the company's expansion across its beachhead renovation and interior design market in Singapore, with longer-term ambitions to extend its platform across other service industries where payment trust remains a structural problem.
Born From Personal Experience
Handshake Finance launched in September 2025, founded by Christopher Chan and Lee Jun Xian. Both had seen the trust gap up close.
Jun's close friend lost S$80,000 in pre-payments to a renovation company that collapsed mid-project. At the same time, Christopher's friend paid a deposit on a rental home she had never viewed, only to discover the listing was fraudulent. Both incidents pointed to the same structural failure: in service industries, someone always carries the risk, and when trust breaks down, there is little recourse on either side.
The two founders met as university classmates in London and returned to the problem with complementary backgrounds. Christopher Chan had spent his career in fintech, designing compliant payment flows on regulated infrastructure. Lee Jun Xian came from venture capital, with experience scaling early-stage companies from zero to one.
Trust as the foundation, not the feature
Handshake operates on bank-grade payment infrastructure provided by MAS-regulated partners. All payment flows are fully MAS regulated, and funds are held with DBS in segregated escrow accounts. For the founders, this is not a checkbox -- it is the entire foundation of the business.
"We are trying to solve a structural trust gap in service industries. But before any of that, our users have to trust us," said Christopher Chan, Co-Founder of Handshake Finance. "Making sure every fund flow is fully compliant, and that our users feel completely assured handing us money in what are often life-changing transactions, is our number one priority. Everything else is built on top of that."
Closing the Trust Gap Across Service Industries
Every high-trust service transaction carries the same structural flaw: either the customer pays before work is done, or the provider works before getting paid. Someone always carries the risk. Across industries -- from renovation and interior design to event planning, creative agencies, and professional services -- that risk falls entirely on one side, and when trust breaks down, there is little recourse for either party.
Handshake Finance was built to close that gap. The platform holds customer funds in escrow and releases them to service providers against agreed milestones, giving buyers protection from pre-payment risk while giving service providers the confidence to deliver. The model is designed to work across any service industry where the payment trust problem exists.
Why Renovation and Interior Design Is Handshake's Beachhead Market
Renovation was where the structural failure ran deepest. The industry operates with no mandatory licensing or regulatory framework. Anyone can set up as an interior designer with no accreditation required, leaving homeowners with no reliable way to assess accountability before signing a contract.
There is no standard payment framework either. Homeowners routinely pay up to 50% of the total project value upfront, with funds going directly to the interior designer before any work begins. If a project stalls or a firm shuts down, there is limited protection and recourse. At the other end of the project, interior designers face the opposite problem: the final handover payment, where homeowners hold most of the leverage, can be withheld over disputes that wipe out up to half a project's margin.
Eight Months of Listening Before a Single Line of Code
Before writing any software, the Handshake team spent eight months speaking with more than 80 interior designers and homeowners across Singapore to understand the real frictions on both sides of the transaction. What they found reinforced the decision to start here: high transaction values, a broken payment norm, an unregulated supply side, and no existing platform that protected both parties.
That research shaped how the product was built. After a renovation contract is signed, Handshake's AI automatically generates the transaction structure with line items, payment schedules, and sub-milestones set out clearly to remove ambiguity. Homeowners place funds into escrow rather than paying upfront directly to the interior designer.
Payment releases to the designer as work progresses against agreed milestones, with sub-milestone releases providing faster cashflow access without compromising homeowner protection. The platform also replaces the manual spreadsheet-based back-office admin most interior design firms still run, and offers complimentary mediation and independent assessments in the event of a dispute.
More than 40 Interior Design Companies Onboarded and 2 Major Partnerships Signed
Handshake now has more than 40 interior design companies onboarded. The company has signed partnerships with Renonation.sg and Network SG, two of Singapore's most established renovation marketplaces, to drive awareness and adoption across the broader ecosystem.
"It is an incredible feeling to see this much support behind us, and we are excited about what is ahead," said Lee Jun Xian, Co-Founder of Handshake Finance. "We are industry-agnostic by design, but we are laser-focused on fixing renovation first. The scams that are still everyday occurrences in this space need to go, and the transactional experience for everyone involved needs to be better before we turn our attention to the next industry or market."
Homeowners and interior designers can learn more or request access at handshake.finance.
Hashtag: #HandshakeFinance
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
About Handshake Finance
Handshake Finance is a Singapore-based fintech building escrow-as-a-service infrastructure for high-trust service industries. The platform holds customer funds in segregated escrow accounts and releases them against agreed milestones, protecting buyers from pre-payment risk while giving service providers the confidence to deliver. All payment flows are fully MAS regulated. Funds are held with DBS. Handshake is currently focused on Singapore's renovation and interior design market as its beachhead, with plans to expand across other service industries and Southeast Asia.
** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
Handshake Finance Founders Christopher Chan (Left) and Lee Jun Xian (Right)
One platform to find, hire, onboard, manage and orchestrate AI agents across every major LLM provider, governed by one Passport, one audit trail and one contract, and built to become the neutral marketplace where agents transact across sectors.
GEORGE TOWN, CAYMAN ISLANDS - Media OutReach Newswire - 3 June 2026 - agnt8x, the AI agent recruitment and workforce management platform built by EightX Labs Ltd, today opened to public access at agnt8x.ai. It lets enterprises find, hire, onboard, manage and orchestrate AI agents the way they manage human teams, across all major LLM providers, under one Passport, one audit trail and one contract.
Your next hire isn’t human: agnt8x Launches the World’s First AI Agent Recruitment and Workforce Management Platform Every major AI lab has launched agents in the past twelve months. The result is fragmentation reaching every enterprise: agents from three or four providers running with no coherent recruitment, onboarding, audit or management path across them. There is no Workday for AI agents. agnt8x is the neutral layer above the providers.
The platform is built on five pillars. FIND is an ontological job board matching agents to roles. FORGE is a private enterprise catalogue for onboarding a company's own agents. STUDIO is a nine-step onboarding flow. MANAGE is the workforce control plane: real-time profit and loss per agent, alignment monitoring, full audit trail, and unified billing across every provider, memory layer and per-task call. CONDUCTOR orchestrates multi-agent teams across providers on one canvas, a capability no other platform has built.
agnt8x is a two-sided marketplace. Alongside the enterprise platform, an independent global builder marketplace lets developers anywhere publish and monetise the agents and apps they create, matched to the companies that need them and earning recurring monthly revenue for as long as they run. Builder supply is live in production today.
agnt8x ships in three modes, the same agents across all three: SaaS for start-ups through mid-market; Tenant Workspace, a single-tenant deployment for larger enterprises; and EMBASSY, the full platform inside the customer's own VPC with zero agnt8x access to runtime data, for systemically important institutions and government. Pooled platform compute from agnt8x, or Bring-Your-Own-Key, is available at every tier.
agnt8x today also published the EightX Agent Manifest (EAM) v0.1 under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence: an open specification for portable agent definition, so an agent compiles to every major runtime and is never locked to a single provider.
Open by design extends beyond the agent. agnt8x is engaging with the leading bodies defining how agents prove who they are and pay one another, and intends to align the Passport with the emerging open standards for agentic identity and settlement, with more to say in the coming weeks.
"Every company will have an AI workforce, and right now there is no system to run it," said John Shipman, Founder and CEO of EightX Labs. "agnt8x is the recruitment and management layer above the AI providers, built to grow the business, run operations, and govern the workforce with real accountability. And once agents can be trusted to act, the next step is letting them transact, across sectors, on open standards and rails no single company controls. Your next hire isn't human, and it should be recruited, onboarded, paid and managed with the same discipline as any other member of your team."
EightX Labs is chaired by David Puth, former Chief Executive of Centre Consortium and of CLS Bank. The company was founded by John Shipman, Chief Executive Officer, PwC's first global Digital Assets Leader and former Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of a leading Australian wealth manager. Co-founder Michael Harte is a former Group CIO and COO at three global banks. agnt8x is live now at agnt8x.ai.
Hashtag: #EightX #agnt8x
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
About EightX Labs
EightX Labs Ltd builds agnt8x, the operating system for the agent economy. The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with a US subsidiary, EightX US LLC, in Delaware. Counsel: Cooley LLP (US) and Carey Olsen (Cayman).
GEORGE TOWN, CAYMAN ISLANDS - Media OutReach Newswire - 3 June 2026 - agnt8x, the AI agent recruitment and workforce management platform built by EightX Labs Ltd, today opened to public access at agnt8x.ai. It lets enterprises find, hire, onboard, manage and orchestrate AI agents the way they manage human teams, across all major LLM providers, under one Passport, one audit trail and one contract.
Your next hire isn’t human: agnt8x Launches the World’s First AI Agent Recruitment and Workforce Management Platform
Every major AI lab has launched agents in the past twelve months. The result is fragmentation reaching every enterprise: agents from three or four providers running with no coherent recruitment, onboarding, audit or management path across them. There is no Workday for AI agents. agnt8x is the neutral layer above the providers.
The platform is built on five pillars. FIND is an ontological job board matching agents to roles. FORGE is a private enterprise catalogue for onboarding a company's own agents. STUDIO is a nine-step onboarding flow. MANAGE is the workforce control plane: real-time profit and loss per agent, alignment monitoring, full audit trail, and unified billing across every provider, memory layer and per-task call. CONDUCTOR orchestrates multi-agent teams across providers on one canvas, a capability no other platform has built.
agnt8x is a two-sided marketplace. Alongside the enterprise platform, an independent global builder marketplace lets developers anywhere publish and monetise the agents and apps they create, matched to the companies that need them and earning recurring monthly revenue for as long as they run. Builder supply is live in production today.
agnt8x ships in three modes, the same agents across all three: SaaS for start-ups through mid-market; Tenant Workspace, a single-tenant deployment for larger enterprises; and EMBASSY, the full platform inside the customer's own VPC with zero agnt8x access to runtime data, for systemically important institutions and government. Pooled platform compute from agnt8x, or Bring-Your-Own-Key, is available at every tier.
agnt8x today also published the EightX Agent Manifest (EAM) v0.1 under the Apache 2.0 open-source licence: an open specification for portable agent definition, so an agent compiles to every major runtime and is never locked to a single provider.
Open by design extends beyond the agent. agnt8x is engaging with the leading bodies defining how agents prove who they are and pay one another, and intends to align the Passport with the emerging open standards for agentic identity and settlement, with more to say in the coming weeks.
"Every company will have an AI workforce, and right now there is no system to run it," said John Shipman, Founder and CEO of EightX Labs. "agnt8x is the recruitment and management layer above the AI providers, built to grow the business, run operations, and govern the workforce with real accountability. And once agents can be trusted to act, the next step is letting them transact, across sectors, on open standards and rails no single company controls. Your next hire isn't human, and it should be recruited, onboarded, paid and managed with the same discipline as any other member of your team."
EightX Labs is chaired by David Puth, former Chief Executive of Centre Consortium and of CLS Bank. The company was founded by John Shipman, Chief Executive Officer, PwC's first global Digital Assets Leader and former Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of a leading Australian wealth manager. Co-founder Michael Harte is a former Group CIO and COO at three global banks. agnt8x is live now at agnt8x.ai.
Hashtag: #EightX #agnt8x
The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.
About EightX Labs
EightX Labs Ltd builds agnt8x, the operating system for the agent economy. The company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with a US subsidiary, EightX US LLC, in Delaware. Counsel: Cooley LLP (US) and Carey Olsen (Cayman).
** This press release is distributed by Media OutReach Newswire through automated distribution system, for which the client assumes full responsibility. **
