Mai Le

Mai Le is a Vietnamese-born entrepreneur and co-founder of SAPI, a London-based payment-linked financing platform. She grew up in a small village in Vietnam before building an international career in finance, spending years at Goldman Sachs in London where she helped design and scale lending programmes totalling more than £10 billion. Her journey from rural Vietnam to senior roles in global finance is central to SAPI's founding mission of making capital accessible to overlooked entrepreneurs.

In 2020, Mai co-founded SAPI alongside Alexis van Lennep and Michal Kot to tackle the persistent gap in credit access for small businesses, particularly immigrant- and woman-owned firms. SAPI embeds payment-linked financing directly into payment service providers and marketplaces, allowing repayments to flow automatically from a business's revenue stream — removing the friction and paperwork of traditional lending. The platform operates with offices in London and Hanoi.

Under Mai's leadership as CEO, SAPI has advanced more than $40 million to small businesses, 90% of which are immigrant or woman-owned. The company raised £7.5 million in equity funding in 2024, followed by a larger $80 million debt and equity package led by Hudson Cove Capital Management in 2025. SAPI has established a financial technology entity in Vietnam to accelerate growth across Asia-Pacific markets.