The Covid-19 period has actually allowed KoinWorks to surge forward in the right direction.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we tried to step back and look into the situation. But we realized that it’s actually a mistake because our market kept growing amid the outbreak,” the company’s co-founder Willy Arifin told Tech in Asia.
The main types of companies that borrow from KoinWords are small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have digital footprints. Online shops on Tokopedia and Shopee serve as examples. These kinds of companies have not been hit as hard by the restrictions caused by Covid.
In the past 18 months, the number of SMEs that have digital footprints has doubled from around 10 million to 20 million businesses, according to Arifin. This kind of surge normally takes five years if it weren’t for Covid. That being said, KoinWorks has kept its non-performing loan (NPL) ratio under 2%, which is significantly lower than traditional financial institutions.
During the pandemic, the company reached $15 million USD in loan disbursements per month, and logged positive cash flow. The firm also hit 1.5 million users at the end of last year.
The company raised $108 million USD in a series C funding round led by MDI Ventures. which is Telkom Group’s venture arm. Several existing investors such as Quona Capital, Saison Capital, AC Ventures, and Triodos Investment Management also took part in the round.
The investment comprised US$43 million in equity and US$65 million in debt capital. Since its establishment, the company has raised US$70 million in equity and around US$110 million in debt.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its existing workforce of 400 employees, who hail from Singapore, Indonesia, India and Vietnam. It also aims to triple its revenue and double the number of users by the end of 2022.
Founded in 2016 and based in Jakarta, KoinWorks has expanded from being a platform dedicated to peer-to-peer lending to launching several new features to expand its user base. The company realized that it wanted to help more budding founders from the start of their entrepreneurship journey after having to reject many entrepreneurs looking for loans from its lending platform. Hence, they launched a neobank feature that allows users to open business bank accounts directly from its app. It also provided learning material on how to manage an online business, promote it and communicate with customers.
When the company is comfortable with a business’s owner’s transaction history, it gives them a KoinWorks Neo Card which is a Mastercard virtual card that can be used to do any kind of online payments. The SME can also borrow money through KoinWorks’ lending platform.
They have also introduced an earned-wage access (EWA) service called KoinGaji and a gold investment feature called KoinGold.
As of now, the company does have an interest in going public. However, the founders have noted that they still want to focus on the firm’s home market and have no interest in expanding their business to other countries despite having developers from outside Indonesia.
“Half of the GDP (gross domestic product) of Southeast Asian come from Indonesia, we know where the money is,” Arifin stressed.
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