DMP leads $3m Series A for Malaysia's Jirnexu - update

Additional participants in the round included Celebes Capital, NTT Docomo Ventures and Tuas Capital Partners, along with PropertyGuru co-founder Steve Melhuish. Jirnexu will use the capital to drive product development and recruitment for its expansion in Southeast Asia, focusing on its existing markets of Malaysia and Indonesia.

In its hiring drive the company will focus on filling out senior management roles in both markets to ensure that local offices have adequate personnel to deal with customer issues without intervention from head office. Software development teams, particularly for its trademark product, the digital workflow management solution and CRM platform XpressApply, will also be reinforced.

"Because we do service primarily regulated financial institutions, when it comes to developing software for them, we have to meet very high levels of standards for security compliance and for service level agreements," Jirnexu CEO Y.T. Siew told AVCJ. "So our software does need to be far more robust than your average online customer acquisition or e-commerce platform."

Jirnexu develops technology solutions for customer acquisition and retention, aimed at institutional clients such as banks and insurance companies. Its products cover the marketing, acquisition, fulfillment and loyalty stages of customer acquisition, which in Southeast Asia are still labor-intensive and based on paper forms or face-to-face contact. Customers include Citibank, HSBC, Tokio Marine Life, Manulife, Aeon and others.

The company claims XpressApply offers customer conversion rates 200% higher than traditional sales methods. It also allows better tracking and analytics than other approaches, generates on average one tenth of the complaints and customer enquiries that traditional telesales approaches do, and reduces the response time required for customers to receive their products or promotional items. The company plans to offer XpressApply on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model by the second half of 2016.

As it expands, Jirnexu plans to focus on hires with local expertise that can deal with the regulatory and legal issues particular to the markets where it operates. "Anyone can build a financial model to enter a market," Siew said, "but what makes or breaks a business is not the Excel sheet, it's the guys who are there on the ground every day who know where the problems are going to be, and what's going to blindside you."

Founded as Digital Media Partners in 2011, DMP seeks technology and digital media investments in emerging markets, with a particular focus on the consumer internet and its supporting infrastructure in Southeast Asia. Its portfolio companies include Singapore-based mobile payment system developer Coda Payments and Thai clinical services marketplace Medical Departures.

"Financial institutions operating in emerging markets have traditionally struggled with digital customer acquisition," Dmitry Levit, a partner at DMP, said in a statement. "Jirnexu enables its business partners to be innovative in the way they generate leads online, convert those leads into customers, handle their fulfilment and keep them loyal."

 

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Financials
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Venture
• Malaysia
• Singapore