Brief: CompareAsia sees $50m new funding from Alibaba and other investors

Photo credit: Pixabay.

The news:

• Financial comparison site CompareAsiaGroup has raised US$50 million in a round led by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.
• Other backers in the series B round included Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund – Alibaba’s non-profit startup support program, SBI Group, and H&Q Utrust. Existing investors, including Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Nova Founders Capital, ACE & Co., and Route 66 Ventures also participated.
• CompareAsia operates sites under different brand names in several Southeast Asian countries and its home base Hong Kong. In Indonesia, for example, it is known as HaloMoney, while in the Philippines, it’s MoneyMax. It lets people search for and compare things like credit cards, loans, and insurance products.

Why it matters:

• The funding boost gives CompareAsia more resources to compete with the likes of Compare88 for increasingly affluent Southeast Asian consumers.
• The latest round brings its total amount of funding to US$96 million. The startup had raised US$40 million from Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and others in 2015. That was on top of a total of US$6 million in seed funding.
• CompareAsia is the main product to come out of venture builder Nova Founders Capital, which was started by Rocket Internet alumni Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen and Raphael Strauch. Others are Edirect Esnure, an online insurance platform, and Startech Asia, a web development service provider.

Source: Bloomberg.