Mai Le

Mai Le was born and raised in a small village in Vietnam, moving to the United Kingdom at sixteen in a decision she has described as one made with the boldness only youth can muster. She studied Economics at the London School of Economics, where she developed a deep interest in how people make financial decisions and build economic lives. Her early career took her into investment banking, including time at Goldman Sachs in London, where she spent several years building and scaling lending programmes that eventually totalled more than £10 billion. Alongside her banking career she founded Next Speech, a speech-to-text voice diary application that won the LSE Generate Seed Funding Competition and was subsequently acquired in 2017.

At Goldman Sachs, Le developed an acute understanding of credit infrastructure but also observed the populations most consistently excluded from it. Small businesses run by women and immigrants — groups with strong repayment track records but limited collateral and credit history — were structurally underserved by institutions built for very different customers. That observation became the founding thesis of SAPI, which she co-founded in 2019 with Alexis van Lennep to build a lending model that meets small businesses where they already operate: inside their payment flows.

As CEO of SAPI, Le has led the company from concept to a platform that has advanced more than $40 million to small businesses, 90% of which are immigrant- or woman-owned — directly serving the communities she set out to support. She has established offices in both London and Hanoi, created a regulated fintech entity in Vietnam to drive Asia-Pacific expansion, and built embedded credit partnerships with payment platforms across multiple markets. Her personal story — from a Vietnamese village to building a global fintech — is inseparable from SAPI's mission to make access to capital as straightforward as taking a payment.

In November 2025, Le closed a £60m financing package led by Hudson Cove Capital Management, with the credit facility term sheet signed just 17 days after the first investor meeting — a pace that reflects the strength of SAPI's model and traction. She has been recognised as a UKEA delegate and has spoken extensively about financial inclusion and the structural funding gap facing immigrant and female founders. SAPI's investors include Triple A Capital and Passion Capital alongside Hudson Cove, and the company continues to expand its embedded finance capabilities globally.