Amartha Secures USD 28 Million New Funding Led by Women's World Banking

Jakarta, 4th of May 2021 - Amartha (PT Amartha Mikro Fintek) celebrated this year’s 11th anniversary with a special gift, it secured a USD 28 million new funding led by Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II (WWB) along side MDI Ventures, and with the support of existing investors such as: Mandiri Capital Indonesia (MCI) and UOB Venture Management.

Amartha empowers women entrepreneurs in rural areas with community based (grameen model) working capital loans, ranging from IDR 3 million (USD 200) to IDR 10 million (USD 700) along with financial literacy education and entrepreneurship training. With Amartha Score, a proprietary credit scoring model specifically designed to assess creditworthiness of the unbankable underserved population, we ensure everyone to have equal opportunity to capital even in the absence of prior credit history and/or digital footprints. Amartha opens many opportunities for the underserved women population to provide additional income to their respective families even when they have to stay at home and while taking care of their children.

Amartha develops technology solutions for 3 different user profiles: Amartha for Lenders to allow P2P (peer-to-peer) funding, Amartha for Business Partners to support end-to-end loan management, from origination, disbursement, and repayment, Amartha for Borrowers to provide additional services beyond lending services. The new fund will be used to strengthen the core community lending business (grameen), accelerate product innovations and rollout additional services to both borrowers and lenders, such as: village digitization, group buying, warung loan, crowdfunding, new funding products, as well as be disbursed to fund borrowers directly. To date, Amartha has disbursed over USD 240 Million loan to more than 661,369 women micro-entrepreneurs across more than 18,900 villages in Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

“Thank you, WWB, MDI Venture, MCI, UOB Venture, all existing investors, and all Lenders for the trust. Big thank you also to our A-team, borrowers and media colleagues who has always spread good news about Amartha. What we are doing together is impactful. Last year’s covid outbreak has not been easy for everyone, including us. With perseverance, collaboration and common vision ‘Prosperity for Everyone’ we are recovering well and embarking in the new normal journey. Building products and services beyond current community lending for the underserved women population will become our priorities in the near future. Through partnership with WWB, we will be able to adopt international best practices where women could benefit from technology to empower themselves, their families, and thrive towards prosperity" added Andi Taufan, CEO and Founder of Amartha.

Amartha is proud to be the first investment that WWB makes in Southeast Asia. WWB Capital Partners II is the second gender-lens investment fund established by Women’s World Banking, a global non-profit that has worked on women’s financial inclusion over the past 40 years. The Fund seeks to close the gender gap in financial inclusion by investing in high-performing financial service providers that serve low-income women clients, expand gender diversity within their staff and management teams, and utilize innovative solutions to enhance customer reach and engagement. Yrenilsa Lopez, Women World’s Banking asserted “We are so proud to partner with Amartha as it continues to expand its operations in rural Indonesia. Women’s World Banking is dedicated to closing the gender gap in digital financial services and we are excited to work with Amartha on this important journey”.

MDI Venture participates in this round aiming to boost synergy across its portfolios and drive digitization and financial inclusion in the underserved population across rural areas. Donald Wihardja, MDI Ventures CEO added “In Amartha MDI sees the realization of the promise for accessible finance. By successfully implementing Grameen style group lending, Amartha has proven that it is indeed able to deliver financing, at reasonable rate, to the bottom of the pyramid, and do so safely even amidst pandemic. We hope with our new fresh investment, Amartha can continue to grow and evolve its business models to serve more and more communities, profitably”. With the investment, Amartha will have the potential to synergize with Telkom Group to drive digitization and financial inclusion across villages.

During the pandemic, Amartha has continued to improve and become stronger. Total loan outstanding and distribution of business capital have surpassed the level before covid breakout, this marks 100% recovery milestone. Amartha upgraded the credit scoring and managed to maintain a non-performing loan (NPL) rate at 0.07% for all disbursement after June 2020. Amartha enlisted multiple new funding institution partners, notably Bank Jatim. Since the partnership started, the support has grown exponentially and has expanded to other businesses as well. Amartha is open for collaboration with any parties who are keen to realize Prosperity for Everyone through women empowerment.