Investree set to close Series B funding round

• Aims to work closely with multi-finance institutions and banks
• Targets to expand to other countries in Southeast Asia

PT INVESTREE Radhika Jaya (Investree), a pioneer peer-to-peer lending (P2P) marketplace in Indonesia, is eyeing to close its Series B funding by the first half quarter of this year.

Investree co-founder and chief executive officer Adrian Gunadi (pic) says that this investment round will be led by a foreign financial services group.

The company received an undisclosed amount of funding from Kejora Ventures in June 2016.

Investree has facilitated 600 billion rupiah (US$45 million) in loans to 330 SMEs, with 16,000 registered lenders, 5,000 active lenders between 21 to 40 years of age and has a return rate of 16.6% with no defaults.

“Now, we also work closely with multi-finance institutions and banks because they expect us to provide efficiency in the loan process and help them in cutting costs.”

He says that Investree has collaborations with two multi-finance companies and will go live with a bank in April 2018.

Investree also operates in Vietnam (eloan.vn) by collaborating with local partners to help them in customisation and Adrian says that Investree will expand to one other country in Southeast Asia that is geographically and socially similar to Indonesia.

“We provide our technology to our partner overseas and we also need conducive regulations in the country.”

In terms of business growth, Investree has seen 14% to 15% growth in revenue since 2016.

“Our strategy is to focus on risk management systems. In this process, we have to select the right product segmentation because each product caters to different risks.”

Investree won the “Best Fintech of The Year” award representing Indonesia at The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2017 held by The Asset Magazine in Hong Kong in March 2018.

“This is our first award of the year. Me and the team certainly hope our achievements will continue to grow, as this kind of appreciation becomes our motivation to move forward and facilitate financial access to the community.”

Collaborating with finance institutions

Adrian feels that banks have to work closely with fintechs because fintechs can provide the necessary infrastructure.

“The fintech field will evolve not only to include individuals as lenders, but also finance institutions.”

Investree focuses on the creative sector (media agencies, organisers), services (catering), and outsourcing (security staff) compared to other P2P lending fintechs which focus on marketplace SMEs.

“We think that these industries face difficulties when they apply to banks for loans. So, we want to help them to get access to other options in terms of financial services.”

Users of Investree are mostly from greater Jakarta area (JaBoDeTaBek), Bali, and Medan.

In terms of challenges, Adrian agrees that talent still remains the main difficulty, “We educate and hire millennials because they are eager to learn and open to challenges.”

He also targets Investree to facilitate one trillion rupiah in loans to borrowers in 2018.

“The strategy is to strengthen and focus on products, dive more into various ecosystems, and aim to get more institutional lenders.”

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