Ajaib, an Indonesia-based stock trading and investment app that claims to have 1M monthly active users, raises $25M Series A led by Horizons Ventures
Context & Ripple Effects
This $25M Series A opened one of the fastest funding runs in Southeast Asian fintech: within three months Ajaib closed a $65M Series A extension led by Ribbit Capital, and by October a $153M Series B from DST Global at a $1B valuation had made the Jakarta-based trading app a unicorn less than a year after this round.
The raise also sits inside a broader wave of Indonesian consumer-finance capital — Grab's $100M Series B in state-backed e-wallet LinkAja, OY! Indonesia's payments round, and later mega-rounds at investment app Pluang and crypto exchange Pintu all point to investors treating Indonesia's retail finance stack as a build-out zone.
First-order effects
- Ajaib gets the capital to push past its claimed 1M monthly active users, converting its retail trading app into a scaled platform while traditional Indonesian brokers face a mobile-first competitor with fresh institutional backing.
Second-order effects
- Ribbit Capital — a Robinhood backer — leading the Series A extension signals that the US zero-commission retail trading playbook is being imported directly into Indonesia, forcing local incumbents and rival apps like Pluang to accelerate their own fundraising.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Indonesian retail brokerage consolidates around a handful of venture-funded apps racing to unicorn valuations, with global crossover funds like DST Global setting the valuation pace rather than domestic financial institutions.
The trend: Southeast Asian retail-investing apps are compressing years of growth into months of successive mega-rounds as global funds chase an emerging-market Robinhood analog.