Linx Team · 8/26/2026
Expanding into a new country doesn’t have to mean going all in. For one early-stage financial services and trading firm, entering Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand meant the opposite: moving in cautiously, proving the market first, and only then deciding how far to go. The company is founder-funded, meaning its founders are expanding using their own capital rather than money raised from outside investors. That single detail shaped nearly every decision the company made about entering new markets, including how many people to hire, how much to spend, and how quickly to grow.
The company’s relationship with Linx, the global Employer of Record (EOR) and workforce platform, started when Linx reached out first. The timing worked in the company’s favor: it was just beginning to build a regional presence and needed help on two fronts at once, finding the right people and getting them properly employed in markets where it had no legal entity of its own.
The company brought Linx in for a combination of recruitment and EOR services. In Malaysia, that meant hiring investment banking and business development talent, along with a Country Head to run the local operation. In keeping with its cautious approach, the company kept its Malaysia team deliberately small, just three people, while it tested and learned the market.
Not having a legal entity in a new country is a common problem for companies expanding abroad. But for this company, that was only part of the story. Because its founders were investing their own capital, they were especially wary of locking in fixed costs before knowing whether a market would actually work out for them. What the company really needed was a way to answer a harder question: how do you enter a new country, get the right people on the ground, and test whether the market is worth it, without over-investing too early? EOR let the company start small without the cost and commitment of setting up an entity, while recruitment made sure the few people it did hire were genuinely the right fit for the market.
As it worked through its expansion, a clear set of priorities emerged for the company:
The company has been extremely satisfied with the results. Linx has become its preferred partner as it continues expanding across the region.
Looking back on the experience, the company arrived at a broader realization about how it, and businesses like it, approach international growth: <b>“not every company entering a new country wants to scale quickly; some want to scale carefully.”</b> For a founder-funded business like theirs, EOR turned out to be more than just a stand-in for not having a local entity. It became <b>“a market-entry and market-testing strategy”</b> in its own right, a way to start with a Country Head and a couple of strong commercial hires, get a real feel for the market, build some traction, and only then decide whether to grow to ten, twenty, or fifty people, or eventually set up a full entity of its own. It’s a lesson the company sees as relevant well beyond its own expansion: starting with three employees instead of thirty, testing a market before formally establishing an entity, and using recruitment plus EOR together as a single way to enter a new country. These are all decisions the company expects to keep facing as it weighs when, and whether, to eventually convert its EOR setup into an entity of its own.