Singapore-based fintech platform Spenmo has raised $2 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Rocket Internet, Iterative Capital and angel investors from XA Network, formerly known as Xoogler Angels.
Spenmo was founded in 2019 by ex-Grab executive Mohandass Kalaichelvan who was responsible for the Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant’s strategy across transport, payments and financial services.
At Grab, Mohandass learned about the problems merchants faced when it came to financial accounting and applying for loans.
“We found that many didn’t have the right software to track how much money they were spending. This problem becomes more challenging once you go beyond Singapore, where a lot of this spending data is not digitised…Conversely, we found that that lack of visibility on data actually prevented them from getting loans that they really needed,” explained Mohandass.
This led him to start Spenmo that serves as a platform to help businesses manage spending by tracking company cards, automate invoice payments and digital ledger across transactions. The data collected over time on Spenmo can then be used to inform creditworthiness in a company, which will help them to get better loan rates in the market.
In the last five months since launch, Spenmo has worked with more than 140 companies and managed over $1 million of company transactions on its platform. It also claims to have helped its clients save more than 10,000 hours of finance-processing time and gain access to over $150,000 of loans at 25 per cent below market rates.
The fresh funds will be channeled into business expansion and developing Spenmo’s product. The firm is already monetising and aims to process $3 million in transaction value per month by the end of 2020. It also targets to grow its client base to 500 companies in Singapore by the same period.
Spenmo is also eyeing expansion into Indonesia sometime between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021, depending on the pandemic situation in the region.
Its chief product officer Andika Prasetya, who had previously led product for UangTeman, will play a key role in its entry into Indonesia. The firm sees itself adding another 10 people across commercial, sales and product positions in Jakarta. It currently has a team size of about 15 people in Singapore and Bangalore.
Spenmo will also be rolling out new features in lending management in the coming months to help lenders verify clients, applications and speed up the turnaround for these processes. The firm has several strategic partners on its roster including Stripe and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
