Indonesian Stock Trading Unicorn Ajaib Raises $270 Million From Japan’s SBI Holdings
Ajaib’s cofounders Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan.
Ajaib
Ajaib, an Indonesian online stock trading platform, said Friday it has raised $270 million from Tokyo-listed SBI Holdings in what could be the country’s biggest fundraising round since 2022.
The Jakarta-based fintech unicorn said in a statement that the Series C funding round brought the total funding it has raised since to more than $500 million to date. Ajaib didn’t disclose the current valuation but the company claimed it’s a significant step-up from its 2021 unicorn valuation when it raised $153 million from Series B.
Ajaib, which means “magical” in the Indonesian language, started as a Robinhood-like stock trading app with no minimum deposit, appealing to millennials and Gen Z users.
Our first customers were college students buying one
“Our first customers were college students buying one share at a time,” said Anderson Sumarli, Ajaib’s cofounder and CEO. “Those same customers now hold global stocks, crypto and stablecoins with us. We followed our customers, and our young customers were moving faster than the industry.”
Sumarli cofounded Ajaib with his Stanford M.B.A. classmate, Yada Piyajomkwan, in 2019. Both joined Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 list the following year. Since its founding, Ajaib has grown to become one of Indonesia’s biggest online trading platforms with more than seven million users.
“In this era of tokenization, the importance of global infrastructure for digital assets is greater than ever,” Yoshitaka Kitao, founder, chairman and president of SBI Holdings, said in the statement. “As a platform that handles traditional financial products together with digital assets, the Ajaib Group is a perfect match for SBI Group’s vision, and we are very pleased to be able to build a strategic partnership on this occasion.” SBI said separately it will hold a 20% stake in Ajaib. That could potentially valuing the Indonesian unicorn at $1.35 billion.
Other backers of Ajaib include DST Global and Ribbit Capital, whose investments include Stripe, Robinhood, Coinbase and Revolut.
Source: www.forbes.com
