Jenfi, a Singapore-based FinTech startup specialising in providing online businesses with revenue-based financing, has raised $6.6m in a pre-Series B funding round.
Known for its innovative “growth capital as a service” model, Jenfi has become an integral part of the financial services landscape in the region.
Leading the investment was Headline Asia, with participation from previous investors such as Monk’s Hill Ventures, ICU Ventures, Granite Oak, Korea Investment Partners, Golden Equator Capital, and Atlas Ventures, according to a report from TechCrunch.
Jenfi’s unique business model focuses on enabling online businesses, including e-commerce sellers, SaaS providers, and consumer tech firms, to access capital rapidly. Traditional financial institutions often pose significant barriers to these businesses when they require funding for growth expenses. Jenfi’s platform helps to bridge this gap, offering financing from $10,000 to $1m for use in marketing, inventory, and growth campaigns.
With the new funding, Jenfi aims to expand its customer base in Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and break into new markets across Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. The funds will also be utilised to improve its credit underwriting and risk assessment capabilities, particularly enhancing its proprietary risk assessment engine.
The platform’s risk assessment engine employs data from various sources like accounting software, payment gateways, e-commerce platforms, and digital advertising, to continuously monitor the borrower’s business activity. The engine is crucial in making lending decisions and understanding the revenue growth and marketing return on investment of the businesses it funds.
Since it was founded four years ago, led by Monk’s Hill Ventures, Jenfi has deployed over $25m in non-dilutive capital to around 600 companies. These include Gushcloud, Ralali, Hello Health, Lamer Fashion, Buy2sell, and Mystifly. The sales generated by the companies in Jenfi’s portfolio now total more than $150m.
Headline Asia partner Aki Okamoto and principal Jonathan M. Hayashi said, “We have been continuously conducting research on revenue-based financing, and have talked to almost every single player in this field in Asia. Jenfi absolutely stood out to us. Their technology, product, operation, and traction are significantly better than their peers.”
In the coming years, Jenfi plans to work with synthetic data for better understanding client behaviour and predicting future outcomes. It also plans to develop a tech platform allowing third-parties to use its proprietary scoring models within their own infrastructure. Jenfi’s future plans also include offering growth capital to more clients through dynamic limits, which can be adjusted based on client needs and creditworthiness.
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