Pluang Secures Pre-Series B Funding, to Expand Partnerships and Product Development

Investment app Pluang announced to finalize pre-series B fundraising of $20 million or 288.8 billion Rupiah. The funding consortium was led by Openspace Ventures backed by investors who have been involved in the previous rounds, including Go-Ventures.

The company is to use the fresh fund to develop and launch new financial products, expand product offerings among business partners. The company also plans to build a team and develop automation features.

"Previously, these investment assets were only available to the well-off. However, we believe that everyone should have the same opportunity to enhance their savings. Therefore, our new products will later accommodate this goal," Pluang's Co-Founder, Claudia Kolonas said.

Pluang has received Series A funding worth $3 million in March 2019. The team claims to reach more than one million active users on the application. The biggest growth is up to 20 times in 2020. Pandemic is said to be a factor triggering this growth that encourages the public to start investing.

“Pluang has successfully demonstrated tremendous business growth in the last 12 months. We are very enthusiastic to support Pluang, along with the company's ambition to continue to facilitate Indonesians to invest,” Openspace Ventures' Founding Partner, Shance Chesson said.

Business focus

Pluang's current focus on product is to utilize government bonds as a means of saving and investing for communities. Feature updates with automation will also help users put saving as a daily routine.

“We plan to expand our product coverage in 2021 by focusing on new products. Therefore, our users can access various investment assets easily and comfortably,” Claudia said.

Currently, Pluang has been selected to provide mini-app features in other applications such as Gojek (GoInvestment), DANA (DANA eMAS), and Bukalapak (BukaEmas). Claudia also said that her team had managed to book efficient user acquisition costs (CAC). To date, gold has proven to be the best choice of its products.

At the end of 2020, Pluang released a new investment product on its platform, allowing users to invest in crypto assets. In collaboration with Zipmex as a partner in transactions, crypto assets offered are starting from Bitcoin and Ethereum as digital currencies with the largest capitalization value today.

Gold investment app

Gold investment is considered to be a good starting point for increasing the penetration of digital investment services to a wider audience - we call it gold as a digital investment catalyst. Apart from having less risk, many Indonesians have done the activity of turning gold into an investment, only by manual method (buying and selling directly at the store.

Based on this information, investment applications have continued to emerge in the past decade, including gold instruments. Our data shows there are at least 9 application providers that offer investment products.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian