QED makes first investment in SEA with $5m pre-Series B round in Pashouses

By Leandra Monteiro

QED Investors, a global venture capital firm focused on investing in disruptive financial services companies, announced its first investment in Southeast Asia.

QED led a $5 million pre-Series B round in Pashouses, a FinTech company that sits at the intersection of property and technology, based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“As we saw in India, the opportunities for companies to make immediate and lasting change is tremendous,” said QED Investors, Partner and Head of Asia, Sandeep Patil. “Southeast Asia boasts a vast and growing economy. Taken together, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam would be the seventh-largest economy and third-most populous country in the world. With a median age of 30 years, it is no wonder that smartphones are everywhere, and tech is being adopted across all walks of life.”

Pashouses is an end-to-end transactional marketplace for buying and selling houses in Jakarta, from brokerage and renovation to staging and mortgage. Pashouses uses technology to help create a path to homeownership by helping buyers make informed decisions from how much to pay for a property to the type of financing structures available.

“Owning a home is an important part of the Indonesian culture, but the current structure is incredibly complex and fragmented,” said Patil. “There are no central databases for properties like the MLS in the U.S. Buyers search for homes in classified ads or through signs at the front of the house, sellers ask friends for referrals of brokers they have used in the past, agents drive around neighborhoods asking people one-on-one for leads on potential properties that might be available. Imagine buying a home before the internet. That is still largely the process in Indonesia today. The process is opaque, but digitization has the potential to remove a lot of this friction.”

Pashouses, CEO, Junghans Tasani shared, “We are excited to tap into QED’s experience from fintech solutions in growth markets, especially in view of macroeconomic conditions globally.”

“Some 40 percent of Indonesians are unbanked today, meaning the potential to help democratize access to financial products for large swarths of the country is huge,” said Patil. “At the same time, smart phone penetration is almost 62 percent. The opportunity to serve a digitally native population and to build on existing infrastructure is growing every day.”

Founded in 2007, QED Investors has invested in 28 unicorns and has $4.3 billion under management.