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

Skorlife, the fintech that wants to give Indonesians more transparency into 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 last funding round was $2.2 million in pre-seed funding announced in September. Co-founded by Ongki Kurniawan and Karan Khetan,  Skorlife launched to the public around the same time.

Since then, it has reached 100,000 downloads. Other milestones Skorlife has hit over the past eight months include being the only credit builder admitted by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) of Indonesia into 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 gives personalized advice on how they can improve their credit and keep safe from identity theft. For example, it will remind them to pay bills on them, improve their credit mix and watch the age of their credit. It also provides 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 about approvals due to lack of a robust credit scoring infrastructure and data. As a result, low interest credit products, including credit cards, are usually only accessible to people with the highest credit scores, or super primes. On the other end, subprime lenders are served by peer-to-peer lending and buy now, pay later platforms, but those 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 don’t make the cut for 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 the OJK’s regulatory sandbox, which gives it more flexibility to plan its business model. Its new funding will be used on product development, marketing and hiring.