Just as the year of the Tiger set to start, this deal came rushing in. Say hi to Indonesian open finance startup, Ayoconnect, whose $15M Series B was just led by — you guessed it — Tiger Global. 🐯

• Prosus' PayU, Alto Partners, William Hockey (Plaid co-founder) and Jerry Ng (Bank Jago President) also cashed in.
• It processed 50M transactions for 25M users in 2021.

🔙  The Context

Founded in 2016, it builds APIs (basically plug-and-play tech with pre-built capabilities) and aggregates financial data from tons of sources.

• It has over 200 customers big and small, including Bukalapak, Dana, HomeCredit, Lazada, Bank Rakyat Indonesia and Pegadaian.
• It also provides data on all kinds of people, including the underbanked, which helps companies build more and better services for them.

🤑  How it works

Its APIs focus on helping companies and institutions do two things:

Quickly provide financial services. Forget building your own product or acquiring a fintech with the tech capabilities! These could take months (or more) and cost tons of $$$.

• Allow your customers to pay utility bills, make transactions, open bank accounts, top-up e-wallets, pay for tuition and more through their APIs.
• Whether you're an e-commerce giant, leading bank or a school, there's something for everyone — get access to over 4,000 different financial products.

Access data. This helps companies make better decisions and power their services. Companies can now easily verify identities, distribute loans, generate leads, score credit and more.

• Get access to banking, telecom, e-commerce, transaction, payroll and other forms of data.
• Through Ayoconnect, Bukalapak built an effective yet lower-cost marketing strategy to expand to 500 cities and 7M MSME partners.

🌊  Across the SEA

It's launching Indonesia's first-ever direct debit service, prepping cards-as-a-service capabilities and is (finally) ready to expand across SEA!

• With fellow open finance startups Brankas and Finantier expanding across the region, you better bet this is a space to watch.