Indonesia’s Skorlife gets funding to give Indonesians power over their credit scores

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Skorlife, the fintech that wants 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 most recent 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 Skorlife has hit in the past eight months include being the only credit builder admitted by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) of Indonesia in a regulatory sandbox, and receiving ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications.

Skorlife’s app shows users their credit scores and reports from Indonesia’s 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 look at the age of their credit. It also has 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 TechCrunch that many Indonesians have limited access to fair credit because banks and financial institutions tend to be very conservative when it comes to approvals due to a lack of a robust credit scoring infrastructure and data. As a result, low-interest credit products, including credit cards, are usually only available to people with the highest credit scores, or superprime. On the other end, subprime lenders are served by peer-to-peer lending and buy-now, pay-later platforms, but they tend to have high interest rates.

This leaves people in the middle, with prime or near-prime credit, who have good repayment histories but still can’t afford 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 OJK’s regulatory sandbox, giving it more flexibility to plan its business model. The new funding will be used for product development, marketing and employment.