Sequoia leads $20m Series A for Singapore's Incomlend

Shipping and logistics company CMA CGM, an existing investor, also participated. It follows a $5 million commitment last year from the International Finance Corporation, and a seed round in 2018 that featured GTR Ventures.

Incomlend’s core offering is a marketplace that connects exporters and importers with institutional investors. The service helps exporters get paid early for supplied goods and services, while importers are able to extend payment terms and minimize supply chain risk. The idea is to onboard clients and process trades faster, with better granularity and higher flexibility than traditional channels.

The company claims it has facilitated more than $330 million in financing and has covered invoice finance trades across 50 countries since inception in 2016. It plans to use the fresh capital to build out its invoice finance underwriting and processing technology, while expanding its presence in Southeast and North Asia, as well as in Europe.

Incomlend is targeting a credit crunch caused by stricter regulatory and compliance regimes hampering growth among cross-border trading companies. The company estimates this has led to a $1.5 trillion trade finance gap that is worsening with COVID-19 and especially acute in Asia. It cites an Asian Development Bank report from 2019 that found more than 40% of trade finance applications from small to medium-sized enterprises (SME) are rejected by banks.

“Incomlend’s technology platform is bringing much needed financial innovation to the backbone of global trade,” Abheek Anand, a managing director at Sequoia India, said in a statement. “The massive trade finance gap, combined with declining global interest rates and the high credit quality of Incomlend’s customers, has helped them create a compelling business that helps solve one of the most important challenges faced by global SMEs. We look forward to partnering with Incomlend in their next phase of growth.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Financials
• Early-stage
• Singapore
• Sequoia Capital
• Financial Services
• SME