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Our investment in Finfra: Unleashing credit access for digital SMEs

Finfra

Cento Ventures has recently led the US$2.5 million funding round of Finfra, an Indonesia-based lending-as-a-service infrastructure provider. We are excited to support the company on their mission to scale embedded lending across Indonesia alongside co-investors such as Accion Venture Lab, Z Venture Capital and Matiss Ansviesulis (founder of Avafin).

Finfra’s existing investors include Hustle Fund, Firstpick, DS/X Ventures, Seedstars, Fintech Nation Fund, BADideas Fund and Gold Dragon Ventures.

In most parts of Southeast Asia, small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) form the backbone of the economy and this is no exception for a massive country like Indonesia. There are 64.2 million MSMEs that contribute 61% of the country’s GDP, employing over 100 million people.

Acknowledging the importance of digitisation, the Indonesian government is on a mission to help 30 million—nearly half of the country’s total—local SMEs to enter the digital space in the next few years. But digital onboarding is just the first step — these digital SMEs need credit to support their business growth.

This has driven the majority of digital platforms serving Indonesian consumers and SMEs to actively pursue credit products as part of their business model. Finfra’s embedded lending product is perfectly timed for Indonesia’s growing digital economy, allowing a wide range of digital platforms to lend to their customers through a powerful suite of credit product building tools that are in compliance with Indonesian regulations.

In short, Finfra’s platform serves as the bridge between digital platforms and capital suppliers, offering end-to-end loan management systems, scoring, portfolio analytics and access to debt capital.

Its model is further validated through its major partnership with multi-country digital banking group Tyme Group to support their expansion into Indonesia. Through this collaboration, Tyme will leverage Finfra’s suite of credit products to offer embedded lending solutions such as merchant cash advances across Indonesia.

As more businesses embed lending services and products, and lenders eye the Indonesian market, our platform’s ability to connect both sides is transformative. This collaboration, supported by our investors, puts us on the path to profitability and strengthens our mission to drive financial inclusion and expand sustainable financing options in Indonesia.

— Markus Prommik, co-founder and CEO of Finfra

In 2016, Markus co-founded Danabijak, an Indonesia-based licensed peer-to-peer lending platform together with Reinis Simanovskis. The experience at Danabijak would eventually lead both co-founders to establish Finfra in 2022.

Since its last fundraise, Finfra has doubled its client base and expects to more than double its quarterly gross profit in Q4 2024 compared to Q4 2023. To date, the company has facilitated over $65 million in credit to underserved Indonesian businesses and business owners.

Cento is honoured to be supporting the Finfra team in their journey of further developing embedded lending across Indonesia. We believe that they have just the right vision and execution precision to deliver an efficient and compliant infrastructure that enables wider access to financing for millions of local SMEs.

You can find out more about Finfra here.

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