With the aim to launch financial services, including financing and credit card issuing, Singapore-based startup Tinvio raised a $12m Series A led by AppWorks Ventures.
The funding, which will help it build out its B2B transactions platform, saw participation from strategic investor MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP), a venture capital firm for collaborations between startups and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Techcrunch reported.
Tinvio’s existing investors—Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Global Founders Capital and Partech Ventures—also returned for its Series A, bringing Tinvio’s total raised to $18.5m.
The Series A comes after Tinvio’s $5.5m seed round in April 2020. Founded in July 2019 by Ajay Gopal, whose prior professional experience included leading initial public offering and merger and acquisition transactions as a FinTech investment banker for Credit Suisse in London, Tinvio was originally launched as a way to consolidate orders from different places, including email, SMS and WhatsApp, and let suppliers keep real-time digital ledgers.
It recently entered financial services by adding a digital payments collection and reconciliation features. Suppliers still take payment in the form of bank transfers or cash and paper checks on delivery, making it difficult to keep manage their cash cycles. With Tinvio’s “super dirty pilot” for on-platform payments, merchants can have a smoother B2B payment process. The company has a 12-month roadmap for its other financial services, including transaction financing, credit card issuing and invoice factoring, with pilots planned for the next two quarters.
Tinvio supports payments through credit cards, direct debits and automated bank transfers, and is integrated with regional payment gateways. Over the last two months, 95% of suppliers on the platform have continued to use Tinvio to collect payments from their merchants.
Since its seed funding, Tinvio’s client base has increased four times to over 5,000 businesses in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and other Asian markets. Gopal told TechCrunch that as its user base grows, it is acquiring more new customers through word-of-mouth and referrals.
Southeast Asian F&B supplier QQ Group onboarded all of its merchants onto Tinvio and now uses the platform for all trade orders. One of the reasons Tinvio focuses on F&B businesses is because they deal with a lot of perishable goods and constantly need to manage orders and inventory.
AppWorks Ventures managing partner Jessica Liu said, “Tinvio’s focus on modernizing B2B trade with a seamless user experience has seen it onboard and digitalize thousands of merchant and supplier teams without disrupting their daily routines or procurement workflows. Despite Covid-19, we still see great growth momentum, led by increasing network effects, leaving Tinvio well positioned to dominate this category.”
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