Indonesia’s Ayoconnect nets $15m in Tiger Global-led round

Indonesian online open finance platform Ayoconnect announced raising $15 million in its Series B funding round anchored by global investor Tiger Global.

Plaid co-founder William Hockey and Bank Jago President Commissioner Jerry Ng, PayU, Prosus’ payments and fintech firm, and Alto Partners also participated in the funding round.

Ayoconnect said it will use the fresh capital to introduce new goods and expand the company’s capacity. It will also introduce a direct debit service, an API service that automates recurring payments straight from clients’ bank accounts, in the first quarter of 2022.

Ayoconnect is also getting ready to expand regionally and intends to provide customers with cards-as-a-service. Ayoconnect handles over 500 million API requests per year.

The fresh round follows a pre-Series B fundraising round of $10 million from Mandiri Capital and Patamar Capital.

“We are building the AWS of open finance with a complete offering globally so that we can power the companies of today and the tech unicorns of tomorrow,” said Jakob Rost, CEO and Co-Founder at Ayoconnect.

Through its network of APIs, Ayoconnect, which was founded in 2016, allows businesses to plug-and-play more than 4,000 financial products. Banks, merchants, e-commerce, fintech, and e-wallets such as Bank Mandiri, DANA, Indomaret, and Bukalapak have all used the company’s product.

The Ayoconnect stack is split into two parts. It allows firms of any size create financial solutions utilizing APIs such as phone top-up, utility payments, embedded insurance, and auto-billing on the embedded finance side. Account opening, disbursement, credit, investment, savings, and other services are available through banking-as-a-service APIs.

Ayoconnect pulls banking data, such as account validation, account balance, transactions, and liabilities, to help businesses make better decisions. Bill payments, e-wallets, location, phone, e-commerce, payroll, and other alternative data are also used to offer information on unbanked and underbanked persons. APIs for new use cases are added on a regular basis.

Ayoconnect raised $5 million in a pre-Series B investment from BRI Ventures, Kakaku, and Brama One Ventures in August 2020.