Hong Kong's CompareAsiaGroup gets $50m Series B

Additional participants included Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, SBI Group and H&Q Utrust, as well as existing backers Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Nova Founders Capital, ACE & Company and Route 66 Ventures. IFC proposed investing up to $25 million in the company last November. The capital will be used to improve user experience through technology development and staff expansion.

“At IFC, reaching the unbanked and under-banked is a priority and we believe the best way to do this is through technology,” Vivek Pathak, IFC’s regional director for East Asia and Pacific, said in a statement. “Our support for innovative fintech companies like CompareAsiaGroup encourages disruptive technologies and new business models that create markets for other private sector players to engage.”

CompareAsiaGroup specializes in making the process of finding, comparing, and managing banking and insurance products easier through services that increase pricing transparency for financial products and improve financial literacy. It claims to have served more than 28 million customers across Asia in 2016, with major partners including American Express, HSBC, Citibank and Standard Chartered.

The company received a $40 million Series A led by Goldman Sachs in 2015 with participation from Nova, ACE, Route 66 and Jardine Pacific. Several angel investors also contributed to round, including Zynga founder Mark Pincus and Owen Van Natta, previously COO of Facebook and CEO of MySpace. The prior year, Nova contributed to a $5 million seed round.

Last year, the company appointed former KKR executive Sam Allen as CEO. Allen spent nearly nine years at KKR leading the Southeast Asia coverage for the private equity firm's Capstone operations division.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Financials
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Hong Kong (China)
• Asia
• IFC
• Alibaba Group
• SBI Holdings
• Financial Services
• TMT