Fintech company Pine Labs has raised funding from American hedge fund Lone Pine Capital, bringing its valuation to over US$2 billion. While terms of the deal remain undisclosed, sources believe it to be close to US$75-100 million.

“We are excited to partner with Pine Labs as they innovate at scale in the payments and merchant commerce space, benefiting consumers, merchants and financial institutions,” said Mala Gaonkar, Portfolio Manager and Managing Director at Lone Pine.

The funding comes in just more than 11 months after the company raised funding from payments giant Mastercard that brought it to unicorn status.

Incorporated in Singapore, the India-based company serves large, mid-sized and small merchants across Asia and the Middle East as a payments platform.

Its technology platform enables offline and online last-mile retail transactions, provides customer insights to merchants for targeted sales and offers risk-managed financial solutions for merchants’ business growth.

Also Read: Fintech firm Pine Labs raises US$125M from Temasek, PayPal for Southeast Asia expansion

After noticing the rise in the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services trend, Pine Labs decided to expand its integrated BNPL solution to five Southeast Asian (SEA) markets in early 2020 along with Mastercard.

“Small businesses and consumers are fast adopting to digital commerce and contactless checkout. We are also seeing tremendous uptake in Pay Later services and have now enabled nearly 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to invest heavily in offline and online commerce across India and SEA,” commented Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau.

Pine Labs was started in 1998 as an offline retail payment provider, but today serves more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities as a fully digital payment acceptance technology. Its Pay Later platform currently has 35 credit providers such as IDFC Capital First, Zest Money, ICICI Bank among others.

In July 2020, the company made a strategic investment in Fave, together, the companies now provide cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries.

The company’s key investors include Sequoia India, Mastercard, Actis Capital, Temasek and PayPal.

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Image Credit: Pine Labs

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Cakap, an Indonesian online language learning platform, announced it has raised US$3 million in a Series A+ funding round.

The investment was led by Heritas Capital. Participating investors included Strategic Year Holdings and existing investors Investidea Ventures and Prasetia Dwidharma.

As per a press release, the fresh funds will be used to expand its team, improve its technological solutions and grow its business across Indonesia.

Established in 2013, Cakap develops online learning applications enabling two-way interaction between students and professional teachers through video calls and text conversations.

The edutech startup claims it achieved profitability this year and its student numbers have grown 10 times since the beginning of the year and 30 times compared to the same period last year.

“Our solution solves the problem of the lack of access to high-quality education, not only for students in the big cities but also for the whole of Indonesia, including third tier cities and remote areas. We are excited to be part of the digital learning transformation in Indonesia, increasing access to high-quality education and elevating people’s lives in the long run,” said Tomy Yunus, Co-founder and CEO of Cakap.

Also Read: These Indonesian edutech startups are helping students cope and thrive during the COVID-19 crisis

“Cakap has created a unique and relevant solution for the Indonesian market and there is no better time to scale with many Indonesians and students becoming more internet savvy day by day. The company offers a compelling impact proposition through providing access to affordable quality education,” said Charis Goh, Director at Heritas Capital.

“From 2016 to 2019, the market for online education has grown rapidly, but in hindsight, it was a modest growth compared to 2020’s growth. The current pandemic has been a tailwind for Cakap and the rest of the online education industry,” said Arya Setiadharma, CEO of Prasetia Dwidharma.

Indonesia has one of the largest education systems in the world with over three million teachers across 300,000 schools. Edutech funding in Indonesia has also been steadily gaining momentum, with funding tripling in 2019.

Notable edutech startups in the market included Ruangguru, Zenius Education, and HarukaEdu.

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Image Credit: Cakap

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Indonesia-based fintech startup Finantier announced today it has received an undisclosed amount in funding from Y Combinator, the accelerator programme behind household names such as Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe and Dropbox.

The firm will be joining the accelerator’s Winter 2021 (W21) batch, beginning next year.

With this financing, Finantier seeks to expand its technology team and continue to grow its product offerings.

Finantier had previously raised a pre-seed round from investors including East Ventures, AC Ventures, and US-based Two Culture Capital.

“Y Combinator is a unique opportunity for Finantier to accelerate growth with the help of world-class mentors, connect to some of the top early-stage investors and build strategic partnerships for our future expansion plans,” said Diego Rojas, CEO of Finantier.

By partnering with Y Combinator and Two Culture Capital, Finantier shared it is eyeing an expansion into other emerging markets beyond Southeast Asia.

Also Read: The future VC will be a hybrid between accelerator and incubator. Here’s why

Rojas, Keng Low, and Edwin Kusuma founded Finantier earlier this year to provide the infrastructure and data products required by businesses to build the next generation of financial services.

The startup aims to enable digital platforms to securely work in collaboration with financial institutions to create “seamless and personalised” experiences for consumers, who can benefit from their data.

Finantier currently offers an API and infrastructure that powers other fintech products, accelerating time to market and reducing costs for businesses while delivering solutions for consumers to ensure both can benefit from its Open Finance ecosystem. It remarked it is the first company in Indonesia to provide such features.

Since raising its pre-seed round, Finantier claims it has managed to onboard more than 20 clients as part of its beta programme.

“We leverage on the digital footprint of consumers and businesses to enable them to securely access tailored financial services that improve their financial wellbeing,” adds Low.

Willson Cuaca, Co-founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures notes that Finantier helps to address the needs of roughly 139 million adults in Indonesia who are underbanked or unbanked.

Also Read: Border-crossing and financial inclusion: The story of fintech in ASEAN

According to East Ventures Digital Competitiveness Index 2020, which maps digital economic development across Indonesia, financial inclusion is where the largest divide was found.

“Providing equal access to financial services will create multiplier effects to the Indonesian economy. Currently, hundreds of companies work with their own unique solutions to bring financial services to more people. We believe Finantier will help them to offer more products and services to this underserved section of the population,” said Cuaca.

By mid-2020, there are more than 450 licensed fintech companies in Indonesia with around 40 per cent of them being P2P lending firms.

“Fintech lenders are frequently unable to extend loans to consumers and businesses. This is due to incomplete information, or the inability of fintechs to obtain the full financial picture of a borrower to de-risk their operations and reduce costs,” said Edwin Kusuma, COO of Finantier.

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Image Credit: Finantier

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Mastercard-backed Indonesian fintech startup Digiasia Bios is raising up to US$20 million in debt funding to provide lending support to local warungs (mom-pop stores) in Indonesia. This update was first reported by Dealstreet Asia.

Aside from that, the startup intends to offer a minority stake to partners as part of its equity fundraising plan as part of their effort to offer “something that can add value,” according to co-founder Alexandra Rusli.

Digiasia Bios was founded in 2017, as a payments technology platform that is geared towards bringing financial inclusion in the country.

The company has already developed a large number of partnerships that will help reach its goal of providing digitisation into the daily lives of Indonesians.

Some of its partners include remittance companies such as Western Union and Mandiri Syariah and large vendors such as iRMA and Metrodata.

Also Read: Jakarta, Singapore named as top global fintech ecosystem in a new report

It is also currently affiliated with several fintech companies in Indonesia including KasPro, an e-wallet and payment platform; KreditPro, P2P lending and financing platform for small and medium-sized businesses; and RemitPro.

Recently, Digiasia raised an undisclosed round of Series B funding from Mastercard. In addition to providing capital, Mastercard is providing the startup with strategic assistance to strengthen its suite of financial services.

At the end of 2019, the Financial Services Authority revealed that the financial inclusion index had hit 76.19 per cent, passing the government’s target of 75 per cent for the year.

There has been a particular emphasis on the capacity of fintech to drive additional inclusion and economic opportunity. According to McKinsey, the digitalisation of commerce in Indonesia could help to add an additional US$150 billion to the country’s GDP by 2025.

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Image Credit: Anggit Rizkianto on Unsplash

 

 

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One of the distinctive features of the Indonesian tech startup ecosystem is its close relation to the informal sector. A leading example would be gojek, who started out by working with motorbike taxi riders (ojek) and helping them embrace the digital era by enabling customers to hail them from a mobile app. Another good example would be Warung Pintar, who is helping mom-and-pop stores (warung) digitalise its operations.

These startups have raised a great amount of funding and made a difference in the ways Indonesians are using these services.

Today, at the end of 2020, another startup is getting ready to innovate with the informal sector: Lahapp.

Lahapp aims to innovate how customers are interacting with travelling food vendor, or known as pedagang keliling. Commonly found in both urban and suburban areas, food sellers travelled by foot, bicycle, or motorbike to offer their products directly to customers in their residences. They usually use a modified cart to carry and prepare their products.

A notable part of Indonesian street food culture, it provides a level of convenience that can only be rivalled by food delivery services. But there is one simple barrier to accessing these services: Sometimes, you might just miss it.

This is something that Lahapp founder Rachmat Efendi has experienced many times before.

Also Read: How foodpanda CTO approaches hiring and retaining the best tech talent

“… There is a segment in the culinary industry that remains untouched by digital innovation, and that is travelling food vendor. Often we wait for our favourite bubur, bakso, or nasi goreng seller, but we miss them –simply because we fail to hear them coming or we happen to be away from home. This is something that has happened to a lot of people, including myself,” he explains.

“This is why we are building an on-demand feature that enables customers to check and summon food vendors in his area.”

The Lahapp service is available as a mobile app and a WhatsApp chat. In addition to travelling food vendor, customers can also use the app to order frozen or packaged food from sellers in other cities.

The platform is currently undergoing the testing process and is set for a launch in Q1 2021. In its debut, Lahapp will be available for users in Greater Jakarta Area and Bandung.

The startup says that it has secured 3,800 culinary merchants onboard its platform.

Learning from experience

The Lahapp platform is currently run by a team of 10, including the founder.

Efendi himself is not a new face in the local startup ecosystem. He was known as the COO and co-founder of Anterin, a logistics tech startup that was acquired by MNC Group in January.

There are valuable lessons that Efendi has learned from his time with Anterin that he is implementing at Lahapp. One of them is related to scaling up.

Also Read: Ex-Senator of Japan joins Myanmarese food delivery app Hi-So’s new funding round

“The number of downloads is proportionate to the investment required to build infrastructure. This is why we need to choose an optimum platform, be it from the perspective of technology or investment. This is why Lahapp is available as a mobile app and WhatsApp chat,” he elaborates.

“WhatsApp was chosen … as it was already a default platform for communication. It also does not require a great investment in building infrastructure. It is just like a chatbot, but it does more than just doing conversation,” Efendi continues.

To acquire its users –from customers to merchants to couriers– Lahapp utilises omnichannel marketing strategies. It also plans to team up with cooperatives and local businesses to grow its presence in Indonesian cities.

Beyond food

In the future, Lahapp wants to expand its offerings to include other services including airline ticket booking and even vehicle registration number extension.

It also believes that working with travelling food vendor will open the door to many great opportunities.

“We have yet to find a platform or registry that keeps a record of the number of travelling food vendors in Indonesia. If we are able to seize this opportunity, this segment will be able to compete with others in the culinary industries,” Efendi says.

“At the moment, there are many food vendors that are not able to register their service on various food delivery platforms as they are unable to fulfil the administrative requirements. This is why Lahapp decides to tap into this opportunity,” he closes.

Lahapp is currently fundraising for its first funding round.

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Image Credit: Lahapp

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