Singapore's Coda Payments gets $2m
Singapore-based digital payments services company Coda Payments has closed a $2 million round of funding with participation from Japan’s IMJ Investment Partners.
Existing backers GMO Global Payment Fund, Golden Gate Ventures and Toivo Annus also contributed to the round. Previous investors in the company include CyberAgent Ventures and Rakuten Ventures. The capital will be used to expand into new geographies including Taiwan, as well as enhance various service platforms.
Coda facilitates alternative payment methods such as carrier billing, bank transfer, cash payment at convenience stores, voucher and e-wallet channels for digital content providers including Baidu and Alibaba Group's UCWeb. The company tracks 17,000 transactions per day on its Codapay service and has recently launched a consumer-facing platform known as Codashop, which streams payment vouchers for customers without access to a credit card.
"Coda has built something unique: an online payment gateway that allows merchants to accept payments from more than 500 million customers across Southeast Asia," Yasuhiro Seo, a partner at IMJ said in a statement. "Particularly notable is their carrier-billing coverage: Coda works directly with more than a dozen telcos in Southeast Asia, a position no other aggregator can match."
The company initially focused on Indonesia in 2013 when it received a $2.3 million Series A round and established partnerships with local telecom providers Axis and Esia Mobile, as well as with game publishers Garena, ChangYou, Boyaa Interactive and CJ Internet. It now has offices in Singapore and Jakarta, and employs representatives in Hong Kong and San Francisco.
VC investors have been increasingly active in Southeast Asia's emerging mobile payments market, with recent activity including a $17.5 million Series B round for Thailand's Omise led by SBI Investment and an undisclosed investment in Singapore's Red Dot Payment by Tlkom Indonesia. In addition, earlier this year Paypal launched a financial technology incubator in Singapore.
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