(Bloomberg) — Funding Societies, Southeast Asia’s biggest digital financing platform for small and medium-sized firms, has raised $294 million in its latest funding round to finance expansion plans.
The Singapore-headquartered lending platform raised $144 million in a Series C+ equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, according to a statement. New investors include Vietnamese tech giant VNG Corp., Rapyd Ventures, EDBI, Indies Capital, K3 Ventures, and Ascend Vietnam Ventures. Existing investors such as Sequoia Capital India and BRI Ventures also participated in this round, according to the statement.
Funding Societies also secured $150 million in lines of credit from financial institutions in Europe, the U.S, and Asia.
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Non-bank lending platforms that link investors to borrowers are growing in Southeast Asia, where small firms have limited access to financing from traditional sources due to lack of a credit track record or collateral to pledge. The company, which is also present in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, has disbursed over $2 billion to date in loans to micro, small and medium enterprises, according to the statement.
Funding Societies was founded in 2015 by Harvard Business School alumni Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya. The latest funding round comes on the back of the company’s $45 million Series C raised between 2020 and 2021, the statement shows.
(A previous version of this story corrected the founding year in final paragraph.)
(Updates with details on participation by existing shareholders)
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