Over the past years we’ve seen open banking as the opening act of open finance. Pioneered by Plaid in the United States, we’ve seen this opportunity as one that is deeply local, based on relationships and collaboration. As such, these regional opportunities have presented themselves from Belvo in South America to Finantier in South East Asia. We were fortunate to know the founders of Belvo from their time running Verse, Venmo of Spain. When they told us they were later founding Belvo, the open finance platform for South America, we made a decision to seek out other companies focused on this mission. In order to connect these entrepreneurs we created a WhatsApp group of founders focused on open finance in places as disparate as Mexico City, Lagos, Dubai, Cape Town and Jakarta. It was through this WhatsApp group that we were introduced to Diego, Edwin and Keng at Finantier.
A decade ago I’d met a young man interested in venture capital. That man was Willson Cuaca, founder of East Ventures, the most successful early stage fund in SE Asia. When we learned that Finantier was being incubated out of Willson’s offices, and Keng Low had been an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at East, we dialed in.
Today, Finantier is building the infrastructure on top of institutional finance in SE Asia that extends and makes possible an expansion of entrepreneurship. The same way that Stripe and Plaid made connectivity to finance a single API accessible via a few lines of code, Finantier will facilitate an expansion of entrepreneurship, and it’s this new wave of creation that they will empower that excites us the most.
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with East Ventures, and Finantier on their journey to bring open finance to Indonesia, and more broadly to South East Asia. People say you cannot be a global pre-seed investor, but with today’s tools such as Slack, Zoom and WhatsApp groups curated by brilliant portfolio CEOs, we disagree. An intro from Mexico City to Singapore led to a Zoom call from New York.
Read more about Finantier’s pre-seed round in Tech in Asia.