Singapore-headquartered credit scoring startup Trusting Social is understood to have raised $19 million in its Series B financing round from new and existing investors.
Singapore-based Tanglin Venture Partners joined the investment as a new backer, while existing investors Sequoia Capital, BEENEXT and 500 Startups Vietnam doubled down, according to sources privy to the matter.
After the Series B round, Trusting Social is valued at $102.1 million compared to $49 million at post-Series A stage, an executive said.
Trusting Social declined to comment on its fundraising.
Prior to the close of the Series B financing, Trusting Social had attracted about $10 million through seed and Series A investments from venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital, 500 Startups and BEENEXT.
Established by Vietnamese founder Nguyen An Nguyen, Trusting Social uses big data and social, web and mobile data to provide credit risk profiles. Since its establishment in 2013, it claims to have served over 80 financial institutions and more than 500 million consumers across India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The company targets to cover over 1 billion credit risk profiles by 2020.
Trusting Social operates R&D centres in Vietnam and Australia, employing 60 data scientists including 25 PhDs in AI, machine learning and statistics.
“Five years into our partnership and we have seen Trusting Social rapidly grow their revenue from zero to tenths of millions,” Dirk Van Quaquebeke, managing partner at BEENEXT, says on the VC firm’s website.
Southeast Asia’s digital financial services market is projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2025, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2019 report by Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain. In Vietnam alone, the fintech market is expected to reach $9 billion in 2020.
The role of credit scoring in the country will become even more significant as Vietnam plans to launch a pilot scheme for P2P lending businesses by 2021. The local credit scoring segment is still fragmented with some small players such as CreditNow, Creditscore.vn and MyCredit, in addition to Trusting Social.
