Ajaib, a mobile-first stock and mutual fund investment platform in Indonesia, has secured US$153 million in a Series B funding round, reports Bloomberg.
This round brings Ajaib’s valuation to over US$1 billion to make it the region’s latest unicorn.
DST Global led the new round, with participation from existing shareholders, including Alpha JWC Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Horizons Ventures, Insignia Ventures, and SoftBank Ventures Asia.
DST and Ribbit Capital are also investors in Robinhood, a prominent stock trading app in the US.
Jakarta-based Ajaib will use the capital to expand its team, improve its app and provide credit facilities for margin trading for some investors.
Ajaib, which follows the blueprint set out by Robinhood, also plans to implement financial education initiatives to attract more aspiring investors.
Earlier this year, Ajaib raised US$25 million in Series A funding co-led by Alpha JWC and Horizons Ventures. It later added US$65 million more to its mega Series A round led by Silicon Valley-based Ribbit Capital, another backer of Robinhood.
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Co-founded in 2019 by Stanford MBA classmates Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan, Ajaib leverages Indonesia’s high smartphone penetration rate by operating as a mobile-first stock trading platform. The app requires no minimum sum to open a brokerage account.
The company claims to have attracted over one million stock investors in Indonesia, a country with a total of around 2.69 million retail equity investors.
According to a survey conducted by the Financial Services Authority in 2020, Indonesia’s financial literacy in the capital market remains low at 4.9 per cent.
However, Indonesia’s retail savings and investments market has constantly picked up pace in recent years. The value of the market tripled from US$108 billion in 2008 to US$326 billion in 2018, according to Researchandmarkets’s report. This number is expected to cross the US$400 billion mark in 2022.
Riding on the tailwind of the pandemic-induced investment euphoria among young, smartphone-savvy people, Indonesia has witnessed a trove of personal finance apps for all, with PINA being the latest startup to launch one this November.
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Image Credit: Ajaib
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