Authored by James Carnell Growing up in a humble community on the island of Borneo, Albert Lie never imagined he would one day help build a multi-billion-dollar company—or that he would become a driving force behind emerging artificial intelligence solutions for logistics. As the first in his family to graduate from high school, Lie’s path was anything but straightforward. His story spans odd jobs selling flowers, giving physics tutorials to pay for school tuition, and countless late nights teaching himself to code. Today, having played a key role in scaling one of Southeast Asia’s most prominent fintech startups, he’s turning his attention toward a new frontier: modernizing global logistics through AI.
Humble Beginnings and a Hunger to Learn
Lie was raised in a multicultural environment, surrounded by neighbors and relatives who ran trucking businesses across island borders. Seeing the manual, paper-driven processes in daily operations left a lasting impression on him. “I grew up watching people spend hours making phone calls, filling out forms, and verifying shipments,” he recalls. “There had to be a better way.”
Yet there wasn’t much guidance on how to jump from curiosity to building actual tech solutions. Without any real-world computer science experience, Lie cobbled together knowledge from whatever resources he could find—forum posts, free online tutorials, borrowed textbooks. He worked part-time gigs to fund his self-study. “I realized nobody was going to hand me the opportunities I wanted,” he says. “If I didn’t hustle, I’d be stuck on the outside.”
Building Digital Infrastructure for Payments
Lie’s big break came when he joined Xendit as a founding engineer. The fintech startup was looking to tackle the incredibly fragmented payments system across emerging markets. “We were essentially trying to do what Stripe did in the U.S., but in Indonesia and beyond,” he says. “Multiple currencies, different regulations—it was like piecing together a puzzle where none of the pieces looked alike.”
That do-whatever-it-takes mentality paid off. Xendit scaled from an idea into a multi-billion-dollar unicorn, a feat that earned Lie a reputation as a builder of digital infrastructure that can thrive in chaotic, fast-growing markets. From there, he took on leadership roles—including serving as the youngest vice president at another Y Combinator alum, Spenmo—further solidifying his expertise in deploying AI and automation in financial services.
Transitioning to Logistics and AI
Having seen how quickly an industry can evolve when it adopts digital infrastructure, Lie became fascinated by the relatively slow pace of change in logistics. He points out that while payments went from manual bank transfers to near-instant cross-border transactions, freight and shipping still rely heavily on labor-intensive tasks. “Look at logistics,” he says. “It’s a massive industry—trillions of dollars globally—and yet it’s often stuck in spreadsheets and phone calls. It reminded me of the early days of fintech, where everything felt ripe for disruption.”
This realization led Lie to begin experimenting with AI-driven tools for logistics, from algorithmic matching of carriers to voice agents that could handle real-time shipment updates. “I’ve tried everything from image recognition to large language models,” he notes. “Each type of AI offers a unique advantage—whether it’s streamlining warehouse management or helping a freight broker find the right customer. My focus is on integrating these capabilities so that they solve actual day-to-day problems.”
Bringing AI to the Next Frontier
Going forward, Lie is laser-focused on one goal: to eliminate repetitive, draining tasks so that professionals can do more of what humans excel at—relationship building, creative problem-solving, and strategic decision-making. “In payments, we freed businesses from hours of manual reconciliations so they could focus on growth. In logistics, we’re looking to free brokers and operators from data drudgery so they can solve bigger challenges,” he says.
Lie cites lessons from his fintech background in tackling logistics’ fragmented data. “We dealt with all sorts of formats, compliance checks, and real-time analytics in payments,” he recalls. “Logistics is similar—just replace currency codes with SKUs and shipping routes. Once you figure out how to unify all that data, you can apply AI to flag the best prospects, optimize trucking schedules, or detect unusual shipping patterns.”
Looking Ahead
From selling flowers to founding engineer at a billion-dollar fintech, Albert Lie has built a career out of tackling big, messy challenges with an engineer’s mindset. Now, as he pivots to revolutionize logistics, he’s aiming for no less than a broad-scale transformation of how goods move around the world.
It’s a lofty vision, but if Lie’s track record is any indication, it’s one he’s uniquely suited to realize. Having already helped payments evolve from dusty manual processes to near-instant transactions, he’s ready to apply the same spirit of relentless experimentation and hands-on learning to an industry that’s eager for the AI-powered leap forward. And for a kid from Borneo who once wondered why trucking couldn’t be easier, there’s a certain poetry in building the very tools that may redefine the future of freight
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content