Jeff App, a data-driven financial marketplace operator for the emerging world, has secured $2M in Late-Seed financing led by Presto Ventures. Participation from existing investors, including the specialist data and AI fund J12, a group of high-profile angel investors and industry veterans Jean Pascal Duvieusart and Ladislav Bartonicek, and the founder of Printify, James Berdigans, was also present.
Since its 2020 launch in Vietnam, Jeff has expanded into other markets, including the Philippines, Mexico, and Indonesia. The platform has passed a $10M per annum revenue benchmark, giving more than 6 million people access to apply for over 60 million financial products through its marketplace. The app has proven a clear product market fit, and its considerable growth has happened sustainably, as Jeff posted profit for the first time in 2023.
With the new capital, Jeff will continue its commercial expansion into India and other emerging markets throughout Asia and beyond, accelerate the recruitment of top tech talent, and build out the suite of financial services and products, such as credit, on their marketplace.
The last two years have been especially challenging for startups. Achieving profitability marks a significant milestone in our journey. Combined with new funding, it empowers us to return to a high-growth trajectory. While achieving a market-leading position in our core markets, we’ve established a foundation for a geographic expansion playbook that allows for swift, profitable scaling into new countries.
We can now become key partners for top-tier financial incumbents with our scale. Given the change of habits post-COVID, historically offline-first emerging markets have accelerated their adoption of new digital preferences.
Financially, we can now pursue new product categories that offer much greater market size and a faster path to becoming a household name in emerging markets.
says Toms Niparts, co-founder and CEO at Jeff.
While continuous efforts are being made towards financial inclusion globally, the gap between financial institutions and populations in emerging economies remains considerable. According to the latest data from The World Bank’s Findex database, 40-60% of the population in large emerging economies like Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines do not have an account with a financial institution, and only 10-20% of people have ever borrowed money from a financial institution. These factors, among others, lead to blank credit and financial history records for highlighted segments of people.
Jeff, a leading marketplace for financial inclusion in emerging markets, has built a unique solution to help bridge the gap between sizeable underserved client segments and financial service providers. The marketplace gives traditionally underserved populations an increasingly competitive opportunity to access credit solutions from a growing number of financial services providers. Jeff achieves this by creating a client assessment infrastructure based on alternative data, enabled by automated collection, aggregation, and analysis of digital data footprints such as user behaviour, device metadata, TelCo, and IP-address-related patterns.
In parallel, the data collection creates a comprehensive assurance structure for the financial service providers, enabling tailored matchmaking between product and consumer needs and actionable insights to improve overall portfolio quality and decrease fraud risk. At a time of accelerating digital adoption across the global financial ecosystems, Jeff clears obstacles that once kept financial services out of reach for many parts of the population. At the same time, they create new market opportunities for banks and lenders, advancing progress towards inclusive economic development.
At Presto, we’re strong advocates of and big believers in using AI, machine learning, and alternative data science – especially in markets where the traditional financial data landscape poses challenges. Once the Jeff team launches in India, they’ll have a footprint in 5 of the 20 largest countries in terms of population worldwide.
In these countries, the segments of underbanked and financially underserved consumers are significant, and many similarities can be drawn among their systemic problems.
The Jeff team has already proven their success in Vietnam was not a one-hit-wonder, and we’re excited to see their blueprint for entering new countries and product categories in action.
comments Roman Novacek, Partner at Presto Ventures.
Jeff App Founding Team
Having worked in huge markets set for dynamic growth like Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, and others, I can say with absolute confidence that these large economies are on the verge of massive digitalization of financial services, creating very sizable opportunities for players like Jeff. Knowing and seeing how Toms and the team think and go about their business, I am bullish about what the company will achieve.
adds Jean Pascal Duvieusart, Partner at BD Partners and an experienced veteran in the field of emerging markets financial services.
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