P2P lender Amartha secures $28m from Women’s World Banking fund

By Leandra Monteiro

Peer-to-peer lending start-up Amartha announced that it received a US$28 million investment from the Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II fund and MDI Ventures. Existing backers Mandiri Capital and UOB Venture Management also participated in the round.

This investment aims to close the gender gap in the industry and promote financial inclusion by investing in top performing financial service providers to serve low-income segments of women, increasing gender diversity in their staff and management teams.

“We are grateful that Amartha can continue to grow amid the pandemic,” said the startup’s founder and CEO Andi Taufan, according to media reports. “There are about 30 million to 40 million micro-entrepreneurs in Indonesia, and we hope to tap into least 20% of them, serving up to 10 million borrowers from this segment in the next five to 10 years.”

With the fresh funding, Amartha will strengthen its core community-based lending business and accelerate product innovation. “Beyond lending, we have other services such as Amartha for Business Partners to encourage offline-to-online transactions, supporting end-to-end loan management from origination and disbursement to repayment,” added Taufan.

Hadi Wenas, Chief of Commercial Officer Amartha added, “The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 provides a challenge for everyone, including us. With persistence, collaboration and a shared vision of ‘Equal Prosperity for Indonesia’ we recovered well and started a journey with new norms, and built a variety of products and services for the micro business sector. By partnering with WWB, we will be able to adopt world best practices where women can benefit from technology to empower themselves and their families to be more prosperous ”.

Moving forward, Amartha will open opportunities to work together with the Telkom Group to digitise and increase financial inclusion in rural Indonesia. This newly raised funds takes place only three months after Amartha received US$50 million in debt financing from the US-based Lendable.