Funding Societies, a Southeast Asia digital financing platform for small and medium-sized enterprises, hired the former co-founder of GoBear as its chief financial officer.
Frank Stevenaar joins Funding Societies as its CFO and will be responsible for finance, fundraising and shareholder engagement, according to an announcement from the firm that also highlighted two other C-suite appointments.
Stevenaar has 20 years of experience in the financial industry and co-founded digital platform GoBear in Singapore and Thailand in 2015 where he developed its finance team and expanded the firm across Southeast Asia.
C-Suite Trio
Completing the trio is Nihit Nirmal, who joined as chief product officer late last year, and Ishan Agrawal, who was promoted to chief technology officer earlier this year.
Nirmal is responsible for product management, product design and driving digital growth. He has 15 years of tech experience and was most recently a senior vice president of product management and growth at Fullerton-backed LendingKart, India’s largest digital lending platform.
Agrawal will oversee engineering, QA, DevOps, information security and the firm’s IT teams while also being tasked with building secure and scalable technology. Prior to Agrawal’s promotion, he was a vice president of engineering for two years after another stretch as head of data at Funding Societies.
Growth Phase
Funding Societies is preparing for «larger funding rounds and sustained growth trajectory», the statement added, highlighting a recent Series C round that saw $40 million raised from existing and new investors.
«These changes in senior management helps to lay the foundation for outsized recovery once the macroeconomic situation improves post-COVID-19,» it said.
Startup to Firm
Funding Societies, which grew 194 percent in 2019, is an SME digital financing platform in Southeast Asia with licenses in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. It is backed by major investors, like Sequoia India and Softbank Ventures Asia Corp, and has helped finance over 2.8 million business loans with around $1.2 billion in funding over five years.
The firm is also a member of an AMTD-led consortium that is seeking to win one of the few digital banking licenses to be issued in Singapore.
«As Funding Societies matures from a FinTech startup to a FinTech firm, we have steadily built out and streamlined our business as talent is central to our organization, both by thoughtful hiring and deliberate grooming,» added Kelvin Teo, co-founder and group CEO.
