Skorlife, the fintech that aims to give Indonesians more transparency in their credit scores, has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Hummingbird Ventures with participation from QED Investors and returning investors AC Ventures and Saison Capital.
The startup’s latest funding round was $2.2 million in pre-seed funding, announced in September. Co-founded by Ongki Kurniawan and Karan Khetan, Skorlife was launched to the public around the same time.
Since then it has reached 100,000 downloads. Other milestones achieved by Skorlife over the past eight months include becoming the only lender to be admitted to a regulatory sandbox by Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK), and receiving ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications.
Skorlife’s app shows users their credit scores and reports from Indonesian credit bureaus and provides personalized advice on how to improve their credit and protect against identity theft. For example, it will remind them to pay their bills, improve their credit mix and monitor the aging of their credit. It also offers an Identity Monitoring feature, which alerts users when someone tries to use their identity to apply for a loan.
Skorlife founders Ongki Kurniawan and Karan Khetan
Kurniawan told MinRegion that many Indonesians have limited access to fair credit because banks and financial institutions are often very conservative about approvals due to the lack of robust credit score infrastructure and data. As a result, low-interest credit products, including credit cards, are usually only accessible to those with the highest credit scores, or super primes. On the other hand, subprime borrowers are served by peer-to-peer lending and buy now, pay later platforms, but those usually have high interest rates.
This leaves people in the middle, with prime or near-prime credit, who have good repayment history but still don’t qualify for affordable credit products. Skorlife helps by giving Indonesian consumers access to their scores from Indonesian credit bureaus, along with personalized advice on how to improve them.
Skorlife will work with local regulators as part of the OJK’s regulatory sandbox, giving it more flexibility to plan its business model. The new funding will be used for product development, marketing and recruiting.