Korea fintech player Tera Funding gets $18m

Hana Ventures, IBK Industrial Bank, Atinum Investment, Redbadge Pacific, Union Investment Partners and Woomi Construction also participated. It follows a $9.4 million Series A last year that also featured Woori Bank and Premier Partners. Tera says that four of Korea’s top six financial groups are now shareholders.

Tera is a P2P lending platform focused on local real estate developers that aims to help users avoid loan interest rates as high as 30% in the local private financing sector. It claims to have facilitated more than $700 million worth of loans to date, $500 million of which have been repaid. According to a statement, the business has grown 16% per month since inception in 2015.

The fresh capital will be applied to acquiring new staff from the real estate, finance, and IT sectors, while speeding up work related to project screening systems and risk management processes. These efforts are expected to be buoyed by the Korean government’s recent passing of a bill to establish an adequate legal framework to regulate the P2P lending industry. 

A softening regulatory environment and increased interest from the corporate sector have supported investor sentiment in the local fintech sector. Activity in recent weeks includes a $64 million round for payments services provider Viva Republica and a $46 million extended Series B for consumer loans marketplace PeopleFund, which claims to be Korea’s only P2P lender with foreign investors.

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