Hong Kong Alt-Lender Oriente Raises $50M

Hong Kong-based FinTech Oriente has raised $50 million in its ongoing Series B round, according to finews.asia.

Oriente, which provides customers with financial resources like cash loans, digital credit, offline-to-online consumer finance, point-of-sale (POS) lending solutions, and working capital financing for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has about 5 million users and over 1,000 merchants through its Cashalo app in the Philippines and Finmas app in Indonesia.

The main backer of this round is Dr. Peter Lee, who is the co-founder of property developer Henderson Land and website developer Wix.

Oriente said it will use the money to boost its growth in existing markets and further new developments in places like Vietnam. The funding will also go toward technological advancements, more improvements on its product suite and better big-data capabilities.

Co-Founder Geoffrey Prentice said the investment gives the company a boost during the current troubled times amid the coronavirus pandemic. He said the funding “puts us in a strong position as we look to step up our efforts in a highly competitive sector.”

Oriente has been seeing gains recently, with 700 percent year-over-year growth in transactions and over 4 million new users in 2019. Its sales volume increased 20 percent for merchant partners last year.

In March, Oriente announced a new debt funding facility for $50 million from Silverhorn Group.

In 2018, Oriente raised $105 million in a funding round, then one of the largest numbers for a startup in Asia. Investors included Berjaya Group, JG Summit Holdings, and Sinar Mas.

Prentice, a co-founder of Skype and ex-chief strategy officer, formed Oriente in 2017, along with Hubert Tai, a founder of Ping An’s Lufax and Chinese unicorn dangdang.com, and investor Lawrence Chu.

The company was formed as large swathes of Southeast Asia’s over 600 million residents were unbanked and in need of important fiscal help.