Indonesia’s financial e-commerce provider, Cermati on February 2 announced that it has raised a seven-digit USD funding from Orange Growth Capital (OGC), a venture capital firm focused on fintech.

This investment by Orange Growth Capital, a European fintech VC and backer of peer-to-peer platform Zopa and online trading platform BUX follows as an extension to the Series A round previously announced in September 2016, which was led by East Ventures with the participation of Beenos Plaza.

Additionally, Cermati will also become OGC’s first investment portfolio in Asia, adding to the 12 portfolios which are all running in the field of finance such as loans, fraud prevention, investment payments to insurance among some. Established in 2013, the VC firm has three offices located in Amsterdam, London, and Singapore.

This latest round also sees Hams de Back, a partner at Orange Growth Capital joining Cermati’s board. Speaking on the investment, Hans de Back said, “We are delighted to invest in Cermati and to partner with Andhy and the team. This business has a great growth potential as Indonesia is the largest market in Southeast Asia.”

“In Indonesia, there is growing disposable income amongst the population and a regulator supportive of the growth of the financial services industry, where today there are only at approximately 36 percent of Indonesians that are customers of financial institutions. We are looking forward to working with Cermati to build a top tier financial e-commerce portal in Indonesia,” he added.

Founded in April 2015, Cermati is an online platform that helps customers research and acquires financial products, such as credit cards, auto loans, personal loans, and mortgages. It claims to have become the most visited financial e-commerce site in Indonesia, posting 3.2 million monthly visits in December 2016 and facilitating over IDR 100 billion worth of consumer loans in 2016.

Oby Sumampouw, the CTO and co­founder of Cermati, said: “We are focused on building a financial technology platform to provide the most streamline and easy to use experience for Indonesians to discover and get financial products.”

The latest investment will be used for product development and further technical enhancements, to improve the state-of-the-art technology, data science as well as analytical tools. Besides, the firm will also be opening more opportunities for tech talents to join their company.

Speaking on the investment, Andhy Koesnandar, the CEO and co­founder of Cermati said, “We are very pleased to partner with OGC, which brings deep experience in building FinTech businesses. We look forward to capitalizing on OGC’s experience in Indonesian market opportunities. This investment will accelerate our progress to achieve our mission of making financial products more accessible to many more Indonesians.”

Source: Reuters