Latvian fintech Jeff raises $1.5m seed extension to support unbanked in Asia

Despite having some of the strongest economies in the ASEAN region, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines are among the top 10 most unbanked countries in the world. About a billion people in Asia have limited or no access to financial services due to the lack of traditional financial data, such as credit scores. To tackle the issue, Jeff consolidates demand and makes use of alternative data integrated from multiple sources, such as behavioural patterns, smartphone metadata, and the customers’ digital footprint - an approach that has already been proven to boost financial inclusion in Vietnam.

“The data shows that our approach is not only helping people in terms of faster and easier financial comparison, but they are also able to achieve more approvals in a smarter way. Both unit economics and growth have seen unexpected dynamics since the beginning of 2021. We have grown over 9 times between the end of January and August. This extra capital injection will help us to reach even more customers and set up for a strong Series A in 2022,” said Jeff App co-founder and CEO Toms Niparts.

"We've been hugely impressed by the execution power of Toms, Reinis, and the whole Jeff team. They have a great vision and ambition for what they want to grow into, and the level of financial inclusion they can bring. We're thrilled now to work alongside them towards that," said Emmet King, Partner at lead investor J12 Ventures.

As a result of the pandemic, the transition to online and digital financing has been accelerated around the world. In Asian countries where financial services have long been offline-oriented, governments are seizing the opportunity to develop programs to institutionalize the digitalisation of payments and money flows; financing MSMEs; and financially including unbanked and underbanked people. Jeff falls perfectly within this scope and thus has received increasing demand for their services from the side of the financial services industry. In order to capitalise on this and scale out supply-side even faster, Jeff App plans to invest considerably in marketing, sales, and B2B partnerships.

“With hundreds of thousands of people serviced and millions of products compared in Vietnam alone, larger partners and brands are now interested in engaging and collaborating with us. This opens new opportunities in terms of co-branded services and joint solutions. The extra financing will allow us to hire more data science resources and sales and marketing staff to package and monetise new products and tools in the B2B market. These include Jeff Conversion Score, Jeff Credit Score, Jeff Data API, and more,” added Niparts.

Ramnik Arora, co-founder of Toy Ventures and Head of Product at FTX Trading, the digital assets exchange that recently raised $900 million, said: “A billion people in South East Asia don't have access to credit because of a lack of a reliable credit scoring system. This is a major contributor to income and opportunity inequality. The team at Jeff is building on all the financial data we generate in our day to day activities to connect borrowers and lenders in a safe and information rich environment,”

Once operations in Indonesia and the Philippines are secured, the startup plans to offer their services in other underbanked countries in the ASEAN region, while not ruling out expansion to other parts of the world in the longer term.

“During our conversations with Toms it became evident that he knew the credit scoring and lending space inside out. He provided very thoughtful answers around this hypothesis and offered a unique insight into the credit market in Southeast Asia. We love backing bold founders with deep domain expertise and are very excited to be a small part of Jeff's journey,” said Wing Vasiksiri, co-founder and Managing Partner at iSeed, an Asia-based micro VC fund backed by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant.