Funding Societies gets investment from Samsung Venture Investment

By Edil Corneille

Today, Southeast Asia’s SME digital financing platform, Funding Societies (also known as Modalku in Indonesia), announced the investment of Samsung Venture Investment Corporation in its latest funding round. This comes on the back of earlier investments from Sequoia India, Softbank Ventures Asia Corp, SG Innovate, BRI Ventures, Qualgro Partners and Endeavor, amongst others. Additionally, the platform has raised credit lines from Asian and European financial institutions to further support small and medium-sized enterprises. Funding Societies and Samsung Ventures, along with Samsung Life Insurance Co., will create a strategic alliance to introduce prospective partnerships and collaborations.

Samsung Venture is an investment arm of the South Korean conglomerate, Samsung Group, investing in companies focused on IT, semiconductors, software, internet services, biotechnology, and more. They have invested in many firms such as FinTech firm M-DAQ in Singapore, food delivery platform Swiggy in India and artificial intelligence firm Cogent Labs in Japan, to name a few. “Samsung Ventures is focused on investing in companies at the forefront of innovative technology. Funding Societies’ digital financing solutions effectively bridge the SME credit gap in Southeast Asia and we are confident that they will continue to lead the region’s digital lending industry and finance the future of these economies,” said a representative from the tech giant.

The local financial technology company intends to expand its technology team across the region to tap on the best of the tech and data talent available. The funds raised will also be channelled towards developing the firm’s strategic and new business models in its next stage of evolution, driving its vision of financial inclusion for SMEs in Southeast Asia.

Funding Societies, which was founded by Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya in 2015, is an SME digital financing platform that connects SMEs in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia with retail and institutional lenders. As of November 2020, it has given out more than SGD$1.8 billion across 3.3 million loans. The platform has also increased its individual lender base to 200,000 in over 5 years of operation.

“We are honoured to work with Samsung as an investor, as we find them a strategic and collaborative partner, in our journey to enable growth for SMEs and create wealth for lenders. We will continue to strive to be a digital finance provider of choice and to make a positive impact in our home countries across Southeast Asia,” said Kelvin Teo, Co-Founder and Group CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku.

Recently, FS Capital (part of the Funding Societies Group) was amongst the first FinTechs to be included as a Participating Financial Institution (PFI) in Enterprise Singapore (ESG)’s Enterprise Financing Scheme. The SME lender also received an exemption from Singapore’s Ministry of Law to provide loans to sole proprietors. Additionally, earlier this year, Funding Societies received a tax exemption whereby interest returns for its platform investors will not be taxable from 2020 onwards.