Brick Announces 122 Billion Rupiah Funding Led by Flourish Ventures and Antler

Open finance startup Brick announced the acquisition of initial funding of $8.5 million or around 122 billion Rupiah, led by Flourish Ventures and Antler.

This fundraiser is to support the vision of empowering the next generation of fintech companies with an easy-to-implement, cost-effective and inclusive infrastructure.

This includes regional expansion plans, such as Singapore and the Philippines, after focusing on Indonesia since its inception.

Other investors taking part in this round include Trihill Capital, previous investors such as Better Tomorrow Ventures and Rally Cap Ventures, and well-known fintech operators including Sima Gandhi (Plaid, Creative Juice), Yan Wu (Bond), Brian Ma (Divvy Homes), Ooi Hsu Ken (Iterative), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs) and Andrea Baronchelli (Aspire) also participated.

Brick was founded in 2020 by Gavin Tan (CEO) and Deepak Malhotra (CTO). Gavin was an early employee at Aspire. Deepak built India’s first unicorn neobank for millennials as co-founder and CTO of Slice.

In an official statement, Gavin said, Brick is building a fintech rail for Southeast Asian technology companies. This funding will enable Brick to accelerate growth, scale technology platforms to expand product offerings, and support more developers in the region to build financially inclusive services.

“This funding also allows us to recruit senior local talent in every country where we operate such as Indonesia, to localize our product and ensure that it is in line with best practices and the highest standards of good corporate governance and consumer protection, especially in the sphere of integrity and data protection,” said Tan.

Brick in Ideal Position for Growth

Global Investments Advisors Flourish Ventures Smita Aggarwal said, “Brick is ideally positioned for growth, with a great team and a leading competitive position in the market with strong regulatory support for open finance.

He continued, to catalyze the growth of financial services across customer segments, Southeast Asia needs infrastructure that enables secure and fast integration of identity verification, credit assurance and financial planning for customers.

“We believe that widespread adoption of open financial tools can accelerate financial inclusion across the region and provide a significant boost to economic growth. We look forward to working with Brick as it supports the revival of embedded finance in this very unbanked region,” said Aggarwal.

Antler partner Teddy Himler added, “We believe in an open financial model and vision for Southeast Asia. With Brick, Antler believes the region will have a more transparent, competitive and innovative fintech ecosystem.

While Europe is taking a regulation-driven approach, it is feeling a market pull from fintech apps (and their customers) to build on top of a basic API infrastructure.

“We believe that ASEAN’s most innovative banks, governments and consumer services will embrace open finance as a way to leapfrog traditional payments and data infrastructure,” said Himler.

In addition to Brick, open finance startups that have operations in Indonesia include Finantier, Brankas, and Ayoconnect.

Brick API Solution

Brick builds Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for fintech and consumer technology companies. This API makes it easy for popular fintech platforms to offer payment, credit, investment, and insurance products to their consumers by linking these platforms to hyperlocal data sources.

For example, if a user wants to take out a loan, Brick technology can immediately link the platform with the user’s financial account, or collect mobile wallet or job data to help process loan applications.

This technology automates and integrates the time-consuming process of collecting data from multiple sources to facilitate financial transactions.

That means fintech platforms can quickly offer their users a variety of customized financial products and improve access to finance while accelerating digital adoption across Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Brick now serves more than 50 paying clients, including some of Indonesia’s fastest growing fintech and conglomerates such as Sinarmas Group and Astra Financial. The company supports more than 13 million API calls and nearly 1 million consumers every month.