Announcing Our Seed Funding Round to Accelerate Our Growth in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, 5 March 2019 – Curlec is pleased to announce the closing of its seed funding round led by Captii Ventures – a multi-stage investor known to back marketplaces, new media, fintech, agritech and enterprise applications, to further grow its Malaysian operations and take the online Direct Debit payments platform to the mass SME market.

“We’re delighted to have secured funding from Captii Ventures and are looking forward to bringing Direct Debit to the Malaysian SME market and beyond,” said Zac Liew, co-founder and CEO of Curlec.

Prior to Curlec, SME companies wishing to collect recurring payments have been forced to rely on manual methods such as cash and cheque, or expensive credit card processing. Whilst interbank Direct Debit has been around in Malaysia since 2010, it has historically been a paper-based system that only large corporates could access due to the heavily manual processes involved and custom-developed software needed to deal with individual banks.

Curlec now enables businesses of all sizes to access this payment mechanism that makes it easy for them to collect recurring payments and take control of their cash flow.

“Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business, particularly with SME companies, and up until now collecting payments has been incredibly admin-heavy and expensive. SMEs have traditionally been underserved by banks, so we are stepping in to provide a simple solution that takes the pain out of collecting payments so they can focus on growing their business,” added Liew.

Since launching, Curlec has processed in excess of RM50 million worth of transactions and now serves companies such as CTOS, Funding Societies, HelloGold as well as a wide range of SMEs. Acting as an intermediary between a business and its consumers’ banks, the software built by the Curlec team replaces the old error prone method with an easy-to-use cloud based solution. This digital system greatly improves the experience of consumers and removes the need for businesses’ to staff large finance divisions which were necessary to keep up with the paperwork. It is a leapfrog for payment processes in the country as it solves a multitude of supply and demand issues.

“I believe that this new addition into Captii Venture’s portfolio will bring great value to the payments ecosystem, initially in Malaysia and later throughout Southeast Asia. There is a large opportunity in this space, as Direct Debit has traditionally been the hardest payment method for businesses and consumers to access prior to the introduction of Curlec. We have been tracking Curlec’s progress since as early as March 2018 and they have achieved significant milestones to date.” explained Ng Sai Kit, Chief Executive of Captii Ventures.

For more information on the story, read the media coverage of Curlec on Tech in Asia, The Business Times, e27 and Deal Street Asia.