Daily Markup #354: Curlec grows 400%, raising funds for expansion; Grab Financial Group’s Reuben Lai on crypto, growth & more; Kredivo talks consumer behavior on CNN

October 13, 2021 · 3 min read

Going global

The inaugural Demo Day by Alibaba Cloud x KrASIA Global Startup Accelerator concluded last week, with 500-backed fintech startup Curlec finishing as a finalist.
The program presents startups with the opportunity to join Alibaba’s global ecosystem and develop connections with top venture capital firms in Southeast Asia and China.
According to co-founder and CEO Zac Liew, the startup currently works with 500 clients and processes around 1 million transactions each year. He added that the overall business has grown 400% since the pandemic, and it broke even in September.
Curlec is currently fundraising and expects to close its Series A funding round by the end of this year. The fresh capital will be used to fund its regional expansion and build new software and financial service offerings.
Read more on KrAsia here.

A productive year

This year alone, Grab Financial Group (GFG), the fintech arm of 500-backed super app Grab, won a digibank license in Singapore and raised its first $300 million Series A round. More recently, it partnered with cryptocurrency CoinHako.
In an interview, Reuben Lai, senior managing director of Grab Financial Group, shared that the startup’s aim is to reach the underbanked and financially underserved in Southeast Asia.
Currently, around 40% of GFG’s transactions come from external partners like Zalora, Lazada, and Bukalapak. Reuben added that the startup’s goal is also to be a platform for micro-merchants, where Grab offers tools to grow their businesses.
“We grew our merchant network by almost 3x. Last year alone, loans grew 4x year-on-year. Insurance was up more than 4x in terms of Gross Written Premium (GWP), and in terms of transactions, it was more than US$130 million since we launched two years ago,” Reuben said of the startup’s performance.
Read the full interview on DealStreetAsia here. A subscription may be required.

A shift in consumer behavior

“The number of users who started using PayLater as a payment platform has exploded. When you survey a large sort of base of e-commerce buyers, 25% plus of those users now say that they’ve actually used a Paylater product at least once,” said Akshay Garg, CEO & co-founder of FinAccel on CNN Indonesia.
The pandemic has accelerated digitization globally. Akshay shared that today, its Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform Kredivo is one of the fastest-growing and one of the top 5 payment methods for e-commerce in Indonesia.
He observed that the 35-50 age group, which typically recorded 13-14% of all purchase value, has gone up to 25% over the pandemic. “This means a number of users who were not using e-commerce as primary purchase method have migrated to e-commerce.”
Watch the full interview on CNN here.

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