Bloomberg reports that Ajaib, an Indonesian mobile-first stock, and mutual fund investment platform, has raised US $153 million in a Series B fundraising round.
With this financing, Ajaib’s valuation has risen to over $1 billion, making it the region’s newest unicorn.
Existing shareholders Alpha JWC Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Horizons Ventures, Insignia Ventures, and SoftBank Ventures Asia participated in the fresh round, which was headed by DST Global.
Robinhood, a popular stock trading app in the United States, is also backed by DST and Ribbit Capital.
Jakarta-based Ajaib plans to utilise the funds to grow its workforce, develop its software, and offer loans to some investors for margin trading.
Ajaib intends to conduct financial education programmes in order to attract more prospective investors, following the model put forth by Robinhood.
Alpha JWC and Horizons Ventures led a $25 million Series A round of investment for Ajaib earlier this year. Later, it raised the additional US $65 million in its mammoth Series A round, which was headed by Silicon Valley-based Ribbit Capital, a Robinhood investor.
Ajaib, a mobile-first stock trading platform co-founded by Stanford MBA classmates Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan in 2019, makes use of Indonesia’s high smartphone penetration rate. To create a brokerage account with the app, there is no minimum deposit.
In Indonesia, the business claims to have attracted more than one million stock investors, out of a total of 2.69 million retail equity investors.
Indonesia’s financial literacy in the capital market remains poor, according to a poll performed by the Financial Services Authority in 2020.
The retail savings and investment sector in Indonesia, on the other hand, has been steadily growing in recent years. According to Research and markets, the market’s worth has quadrupled since 2008, from US $108 billion to US$326 billion in 2018. In the year 2022, this figure is anticipated to exceed $400 billion.
Indonesia has seen a flood of personal financial applications, with PINA being the most recent to launch one in November, riding on the back of pandemic-induced investing enthusiasm among young, smartphone-savvy people.
