Alami Fintech Raised Equity and Debt Funding Worth of 283 Billion Rupiah

The sharia fintech lending startup, Alami, announced $20 million (over 283 billion Rupiah) in equity and debt funding led by AC Ventures and Golden Gate Ventures. Quona Capital is also participating in this round.

Both AC Ventures and Golden Gate Ventures were the previous investors that led Alami's seed funding worth $1.5 million in late 2019. The arrival of Quona Capital has placed Alami in its Indonesian portfolio list after investing in KoinWorks, BukuWarung, Ula, and Julo.

"We believe that players in the Islamic finance industry have only just tapped a fraction of its potential. Social finance, for example, can be explored further," Alami's Founder & CEO Dima Djani said, quoting from the AC Ventures website.

Dima aims that this year Alami can increase the loan disbursement up to four times or worth more than IDR1 trillion for the health, agriculture, logistics, and food sectors. In addition, the company plans to explore opportunities for synergies with Islamic banking financial institutions such as Islamic Commercial Banks (BUS), Sharia Business Units (UUS), and Sharia Rural Banks (BPRS).

One of these plans has been successfully realized. At the same time, through an official statement on the same day, Alami launched a financial channeling partnership with BRI Syariah targeting IDR40 billion this year.

"Through this financial channeling collaboration, it is expected to accelerate the recovery process of small and medium enterprises affected by the pandemic, as well as revive the Indonesian economy," Dima said.

BRI Syariah's  Head of Retail Banking Division, Elvera Melladiana stated the one factor that considered the company solid in establishing partnerships with Alami was because it had a positive track record, both in terms of funding, and the potential projects in it.

"BRI Syariah has served SME customers from various levels of capital, and we are aware that in order to achieve an exponential distribution of financing targets, collaboration with fintech companies must begin. This is in order to realize easy, fast, and safe access to Islamic finance," Elvera said.

As of December 2020, Alami claims to have distributed around Rp. 300 billion to thousands of MSMEs throughout Indonesia from around 20 thousand lenders registered on the Alami platform.

Sharia lending market

Alami is several lending startups focusing on the sharia segment. In addition, there are Ammana, Bsalam, Duha Syariah, Dana Syariah, Finteck Syariah, Qazwa, Ethis, and Investree (sharia business unit). However, its popularity is quite far behind compared to conventional services.

Referring to OJK's data, the accumulation of fintech lending grew 113.05% YoY to Rp128.7 trillion in September 2020. The new sharia fintech donations contributed around Rp1.2 trillion of the total.

Chairman of the AFPI's Sharia Funding Fintech Cluster, Lutfi Adhiansyah, stated that there are some factors that make conventional lending run faster than sharia. One of them is in terms of quantity, there are more conventional players and the different nature of the product and business model.

“Many sharia fintech lending targets the productive sector. Therefore, the process is more selective and takes longer to verify. It's different from multipurpose fintech lending, where online loans are relatively fast and the nominal is quite small," Lutfi said as quoted from Kontan.co.id.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian