Pintek Secures Nearly 100 Billion Rupiah Series A Funding to Enhance SME Financing for Educational Purposes

Education focused fintech lending startup, Pintek, announced the Series A funding of $7 million (nearly 100 billion Rupiah) through its parent company, Socap Holding Pte. Ltd. Therefore, Pintek has raised a total funding of more than $35 million.

There are new investors involved in this round, including Kaizenvest, Heritas Capital, Blue7, and Earlsfield Capital. The previous investors, such as Finch Capital, Global Founder Capital (GFC), Accion Venture Lab, Strive, and Fox Ventures, also participated.

Ioann Fainsilber as the CEO of Socap Holding Pte. Ltd. and Pintek's Co-Founder said, Pintek aims to maximize its role in supporting the education sector in Indonesia. The company's proposition is claimed to be validated with the increasing volume of funding, over five times in the first half of 2021, compared to the same period last year.

Throughout the Covid-19 situation, he and his team focused on maintaining capacity to operate in effective ways, such as adapting its product portfolio, launching new solutions for the education ecosystem, strengthening the capital structure, and expanding reach across Indonesia.

"We want to be one of the drivers to accelerate technology penetration of inclusive and high-quality educational and financial service products in Indonesia," Fainsilber said in an official statement, Tuesday (23/11).

Pintek's Co-Founder and President Director, Tommy Yuwono said that the company will use the fresh funding to focus on business development in order to reach more users, improve services, develop products and provide easier access for all students/parents, teachers, schools, and educational based SMEs.

“We discover an increasing demand in the education sector and intend to accelerate the accessibility of financial services in Indonesia by serving the whole ecosystem.”

Kaizenvest's Principal, Gaurav Jain said, "As an education-focused investment backer, we are very impressed with what Pintek has built in Indonesia in the last three years, combining social impact and innovative financial services for their users. Kaizenvest expects to support the rapid digitization of Indonesia's education sector by ensuring high-quality learning opportunities are available to a wider community."

"We are very pleased to welcome our collaboration with Pintek because we believe the company is developing a comprehensive solution that will have a multiplier effect in improving the quality of access to the entire education ecosystem," he said.

The ongoing pandemic has affected the educational infrastructure and resulting in highly limited access to education in Indonesia. More than 68 million students have to study from home, and more than 642,000 educational institutions' operations are affected.

The difficulty of transforming educational institutions to online learning and the lack of digitalization have become significant challenges that affect teaching and learning activities, and the urgent need for education encourages Pintek to present innovation to solve these problems.

Was founded in 2018, Pintek and its affiliates have supported more than 2,750 educational institutions and 100 educational SMEs to reach more than 650 thousand students, and provide financial education content for public with 1.3 million unique monthly visitors. This series of achievements has encouraged Pintek to target 10 million customers in the ecosystem within the next five years.

Focus on educational vendor

Previously, Tommy revealed that the company has started to focus on channeling fund for educational based SMEs/vendors since last year by providing business capital loans to fulfill the procurement of school facilities and infrastructure in Indonesia.

Based on Pintek's analytical research in July 2021 on more than 80 educational based SMEs/vendors, most of them still rely on private funding for their company's capital and operations. Around 90% of self-financing SMEs/vendors required Rp. 200 million cash flow in average for its operations, especially for providers of books and learning support tools. As many as 57% have experienced funding difficulties at least twice in the last two years.

“From Pintek's research, we also found that SMEs/Vendors are still not familiar with funding from financial technology. This is certainly a challenge for us to be able to educate the audience more massively and thoroughly. Vendors/SMEs don't need to worry because we already have a license and all services and operational activities are under the supervision of the OJK," Tommy continued.

Pintek is targeting a disbursement of up to Rp700 billion this year, with optimal funding readiness to meet demands from educational based SMEs/vendors. Since 2019, Pintek has distributed funding to more than 3 thousand students and more than 100 educational institutions. Its realization in the first semester of 2021 is claimed to increase fourfold year-on-year with a value of hundreds of billions of Rupiah.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian