askRobin, a fintech founded in Estonia that has operations in the financial services marketplace in Latin America, for customers that are underbanked has scored $1.7 million in funding.
VC funds Change Ventures, Lemonade Stand, BENE Asia Capital, and Vereeni Early Stage Fund have backed the seed funding round. In addition to these, quite some tech entrepreneurs from Estonia also participated. They included the founder of the anti-money laundering platform Salv, Taavi Tamkivi, and the co-founder of Pipedrive, Ragnar Sass.
The co-founder and CEO of askRobin, Rain Sepp who had previously spent 13 years working at Credit24, a digital lending startup, stated that askRobin was started in late 2017 in Mexico. Initially, the founders developed a FB Messenger chatbot to educate people about the basic financial stuff. However, they soon realized that they needed to go the whole nine yards and ensure that they get the lending organizations to be actually interested in catering to and serving those people while delivering them the best offers.
askRobin, since then has evolved into something which can be more comparable to Credit Karma, which pairs the marketplace of suitable financial products and solutions with free credit scoring, in the United Kingdom. Rain explains that askRobin brings their partner companies to access the customer segments that are risk-based. Then they get these companies competing for the customer segments which results in much better and improved product offers. As per Sepp, this is much better than the status quo.
Rain also revealed that 60% of the employed middle class are unable to get access to formal credit in the emerging markets and are left with loan sharks on the street. Hence, askRobin offers a fairer alternative by collecting relevant financial and other data from users and customers, helping them in building their financial profile which backs them in becoming an eligible borrower.
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Aashish Yadav, Content-Editor, FintecBuzz
Aashish is currently a Content writer at FintecBuzz. He is an enthusiastic and avid writer. His key region of interests include covering different aspects of technology and mixing them up with layman ideologies to pan out an interesting take. His main area of interests range from medical journals to marketing arena.