Square Peg leads $55m round for Indonesia's Pluang
Square Peg Capital has led a $55 million Series B round for Indonesian micro-savings and micro-investment app Pluang.
The round includes a $20 million tranche provided by Go-Ventures, a VC unit of Indonesian super app GoTo, and Openspace Ventures. SIG and UOB Venture Management also participated. Go-Ventures provided a $3 million Series A in 2019 and considers Pluang a core portfolio company.
Pluang claims to offer users access to the broadest range of asset classes of any app in its category in Indonesia. The service can facilitate savings and investments as small as $0.50 across gold, equity indices, mutual funds, and cryptocurrencies. It has about 3 million users.
The company has partnered with GoTo's GoPay app to provide a service called GoInvest, which allows users to buy gold in quantities as small as 0.01 grams. There is a similar partnership with local e-commerce platform Bukalapak, which offers an investment service called BukaEmas.
Bukalapak, which helps micro-businesses go online, raised about $1.5 billion in a domestic IPO last month and has 105 million registered users. It is a competitor of Tokopedia, which recently merged with Gojek to form GoTo.
“We have been impressed with [Pluang founders Claudia Kolonas and Richard Chua’s] vision to democratize access to wealth creation opportunities for all Indonesians, and their sense of responsibility to improve financial literacy in Indonesia”, Tushar Roy, a partner at Square Peg, said in a statement. “The team combines deep knowledge of the Indonesian market with knowledge of wealth management and education.”
Australia-based Square Peg closed its third fund at about $450 million in December last year, three months after establishing a Singapore office – led by Roy – for an expanding Southeast Asian strategy. Recent activity in the region’s retail wealth management niche includes participation in an approximately $25 million Series D for Singapore-based StashAway.
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