Tiger Global, Accel Back Indonesia’s Latest Fintech Unicorn

(Bloomberg) -- Xendit, which provides payment services for businesses in Indonesia and the Philippines, has become a billion-dollar startup or unicorn after raising $150 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global Management.

Existing backers Accel Partners, Amasia and Twitch founder Justin Kan’s Goat Capital joined the financing, which will help the company expand to Vietnam and Malaysia and increase its range of services, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Tessa Wijaya said in an interview.

Asia’s fintech startups are drawing intense investor interest as more and more people embrace digital payments during the pandemic. Xendit expects its expansion to help grow the business at 200% annually, as Southeast Asia’s digital economy triples to $300 billion by 2025, she said. Her startup, whose clients include Indonesian online travel giant Traveloka, processes about $9 billion of payments annually.

“Digital economy is a huge opportunity,” Wijaya said. “We really want to be the player to go to. For us it is about providing anything and everything that a merchant needs to come online.”

Six-year-old Xendit helps aggregate payments processes such as bank transfers, which can be laborious to handle in countries like Indonesia, and even provides working capital loans. It takes a cut of every transaction from merchants and shares it with partners such as banks and digital wallet providers. 

Xendit, which scored $64.6 million in a Series B round led by Accel earlier this year, has raised $238 million since its 2015 inception. The company will be profitable in a few years, Wijaya said.

Xendit relies on “our ability to understand local ways of doing things,” Wijaya said. “We understand the payment behaviors in different markets and we can translate that to regional and global players who want to come into the market.”

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