Infina, a retail investing app based in Vietnam, announced today that it has raised US$6 million in a funding round from investors, such as Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Saison Capital, Y Combinator, Alpha JWC, Starling Ventures and AppWorks. Other firms that participated in the seed include Coinbase Robinhood, and angel investors in other markets.
Infina stated that it plans to use the funding to increase the headcount of its employees and scale up its technology to accelerate its business growth.
The investment platform was established in January 2021 when it raised $2 million as part of an oversubscribed funding round from investors such as Nextrans, 1982 Ventures, 500 Startups, and Venturra Discovery. The Infina platform was developed to make investing more accessible, safe and easy for the local young tech-savvy investors who are intending to begin their investing journey.
Since its establishment, Infina app enables Vietnamese users to invest in a suite of asset classes such as stock trading, mutual funds and fixed-income products, with a minimum amount of $22. The trading platform provides access to fractionalized investment products as part of efforts to allow local users to invest in a diverse portfolio of assets with low minimum amounts.
Infina is considered as the Robinhood of Vietnam, as it has witnessed massive growth in its user base because of a surge of retail investing in the country. Last year, the investment app saw a compound monthly growth rate of 64% in funded accounts.
James Vuong, the Founder and CEO of Infina, talked about the funding round: “Infina’s mission is to empower the rise of retail investors to participate in existing and emerging asset classes so that everyone has a real stake in the economy and prosperity of the country. We’ll be using the funding to continue to build out a world-class team that can develop great technology, deliver the best experience to our users and drive even faster growth so that we can serve a large portion of the new investors joining the market in the next three years.”
The Rise of the Digital Retail Investor
Millions of locals nowadays have mobile apps that enable them to trade stocks as easily as they share content on social media. As a result, the retail stock trading industry has grown exponentially over the past decade. The industry is growing rapidly in the emerging markets like in South-East Asia and Africa where there is a rising demand for investment products in global markets, stocks, forex, CFDs and commodities.
Retail investment apps in South-East Asia like Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia have reported record-high average daily volumes for equity, forex and options trades. The surge is attributed to the ease of accessing such trading activities, which enable ordinary users to generate income. Many platforms have emerged that let retail investors own small shares of firms in both the private and public markets.
