The undisclosed seed funding was secured from East Ventures

Indonesian financing platform Cicil.id today announced that it has raised an undisclosed seed funding round from East Ventures.

The startup aims to answer Indonesia’s financial inclusion issue among university students. The country’s credit card penetration rate is at one per cent, with banking penetration at 20 per cent, based on data by the state’s central statistics bureau. According to Cicil.id, under this situation, Indonesian students have the lowest access to finance in Southeast Asia.

To use Cicil.id’ service, students only have to fill in an application form and have their credit worthiness reviewed by the platform’s big data analytics. Once approved, students can pay in installments through various e-commerce platforms, without having the need to own a credit card.

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“We are actually platform agnostic, so our students can choose any product they want, from any e-commerce platform they want, and we will then make the purchase on their behalf!” Cicil.id Co-Founder Leslie Lim wrote in an e-mail to e27.

For the time being, Cicil.id will enable students to purchase products to support their study, such as computers and laptops. But in the future, the startup plans to also include tuition fee.

Cicil.id was founded by former INSEAD classmates Lim and Edward Widjonarko. Previously, Widjonarko had worked in Bilna (which had merged with Moxy and then rebranded to Orami) and AJCapital Advisory. As for Lim, he had previously worked at Barclays Capital and HSBC.

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“One of East Ventures’ thesis is the post-millennial market. We want to engage with this future consumer group and Cicil is poised to address that. We believe Leslie and Edward are well positioned to capture this opportunity,” said Willson Cuaca, Managing Partner of East Ventures.

Cicil.id is East Ventures’ latest funding announcement in Indonesia after recent investment in various agritech startups such as iGrow and Eragano, and fintech startups such as Cermati and Jojonomic.

The startup plans to use the new funds to grow its team and further develop its platform.

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