ProCredit, a Philippines-based small and medium enterprise (SME) lender, closed a US$4.1-million pre-seed round, led by Integra Partners, with participation from the Menardo Jimenez Family Office, M Venture Partners (MVP), Cento Ventures, Gobi Partners (Gobi-Core Philippine Fund), and several local angel investors.
ProCredit is a tech-enabled SME lender started by a founding team with over 50 years of combined emerging markets and SME-lending experience, having held senior lending roles at Citigroup, Standard Chartered, ANZ, and the Asian Development Bank. Leveraging this deep domain expertise, ProCredit aims to become one of the largest SME lenders in the Philippines, employing credit-first client engagements, a rules-based underwriting and portfolio management architecture, and flexible product offerings incorporating risk-based pricing, all powered by a proprietary technology back-end to significantly reduce operating costs and expenses, while drastically improving customer experience.
ProCredit will expand its loan book through organic and inorganic growth, and raise additional capital. The fintech startup is also considering expansion into the banking sector, given the founders’ extensive experience managing lending operations in regulated banks across Asia, Africa, and the United States. This would allow ProCredit to offer a fuller suite of lending solutions to its mid-market SME customers.
“We are thrilled to add ProCredit to our portfolio. We rarely see such an experienced and thoughtful founding team positioned against such a large, underserved market opportunity. ProCredit will play a significant role in providing improved access to credit to the economy’s most important sector,” said Chris Kaptein, managing partner at Integra Partners.
“We are confident that our investment in ProCredit will further Integra’s mission of investing where profits and purpose converge for a win-win for all parties,” Mr. Kaptein added.
The Menardo Jimenez Family office also participated in the round. The family office invests across different sectors of the Philippines’ economy, focusing on real estate, financial services, and agriculture.
“We are very familiar with the lending gap in the SME segment. While others are focused on consumer lending and deposit acquisition, we think ProCredit is well placed to become the financial services partner of choice to the SME segment,” Joel Jimenez of the Menardo Jimenez Family Office added.
Mayank Parekh, founding partner at M Venture Partners (MVP) shared: “Eight in 10 formal loans are channeled to large corporations in the Philippines, leaving 15 million SMEs and workers with little access to traditional finance. MVP is proud to support Adnan and the ProCredit Team in their mission to unlock financing for underserved SMEs. We were impressed with the quality of the team, focused business model, and proprietary underwriting technology to drive financial inclusion.”
The company is keen to speak to debt and equity investors, Philippine market participants, borrowers, and potential partners. ProCredit’s solutions for SMEs can be further explored by visiting http://procredit.ph.
