Grab leads $100m round for Indonesia e-wallet player
Singapore-based ride-hailing and local services platform Grab has led a $100 million Series B round for Indonesian e-wallet services provider LinkAja.
BRI Ventures and Mandiri Capital Indonesia also participated. BRI Ventures, a unit of Bank Rkyat Indonesia, was launched earlier this year and was active in the local fintech space as recently as August with an investment in payments specialist Ayoconnect.
Grab, which is backed by a number of private equity investors and valued at around $10 billion, has been increasingly active as an investor in its own right in recent years. It set up a VC unit in 2018 and a Singapore-Vietnam accelerator in March.
“We chose to invest in LinkAja because we believe that together we can help accelerate our shared goal of improving financial inclusion in Indonesia,” Neneng Goenadi, a managing director at Grab Indonesia, said in a statement. “The strategic collaboration between LinkAja and our ecosystem, which includes partners like Ovo and Tokopedia, will allow us to bring cashless services to all Indonesians in a way that is trusted, convenient, and accessible.”
LinkAja was set up last year as a subsidiary of Telkomsel, Indonesia’s largest mobile operator, in partnership with nine state-owned enterprises, including some banks. It holds a permit from Bank Indonesia as an electronic money issuer and digital financial services provider. The company describes its mission as encouraging financial and economic inclusion and accelerating national economic growth.
Economic challenges related to COVID-19 are said to be driving rapid operational expansions. The company claimed its gross transaction value and its number of transactions in the third quarter of 2020 both grew by about 3x compared with the same period last year. This activity involved more than one million cash-in, cash-out transaction points nationwide, including extensive coverage in tier-two and tier-three cities.
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