Cambodian fintech startup Clik raises US$3.7M in seed funding, announces key hirings
Clik, a fintech startup operating in Phnom Penh, announced that it has completed a US$3.7 million seed funding round led by Openway and Poems Pte Ltd, the investment holding company of Phillip Capital, a Singaporean financial house with over US$35 billion under management.
The funding round also included several global angel investors, a third of which are Cambodia-based.
The fintech startup said it plans to use the funding to scale its product engineering and customer service teams as it progresses towards its official launch by the end of 2020.
Clik was founded in 2016 as a payment aggregator enabling consumer payments from cards, wallets, and bank accounts while enabling merchants to accept such payments. It claims to be Cambodia’s first independent mPOS and SoftPOS merchant acquirer.
Clik provides all these payments in contactless mode.
The company also has a single, easy-to-use platform that focusses on building consumer loyalty to boost merchant profits. Having developed their own eKYC solution, Clik can onboard consumers and merchants in minutes while adhering to the highest data privacy, security and banking regulatory standards.
Merchants have access to analytics that are driven by fully anonymised data, while consumers benefit from cash-back incentives that reward them for repeat purchases.
They currently have close to 2,500 merchants and five financial institutions in their beta programmes and access to over 56,000 more merchants via their partners.
The funding is claimed to be Southeast Asia’s largest-ever seed round in mobile payments, loyalty programs, data visualisation, business intelligence, and cloud data services.
Clik is also taking part in the National Bank of Cambodia’s Central Bank Digital Currencies initiative, in which the startup will integrate its platform soon.
Besides that, the fintech startup is also working closely with MYPINPAD, which is said to be the only company in the world to achieve Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) certification for its software-only Contactless Payments on Commercial (CPoC) off-the-shelf solutions.
“After two years of scaling up and defining the fundamentals of our regional market strategy, we’re ready to accelerate our growth with the closure of our seed round. Our goal here is to offer merchants and consumers a much-needed and attractive digital alternative to cash,” said Matthew Tippetts, CEO and Co-Founder of Clik.
With the funding announcement, Clik also named Patrice Vignes as COO, who will also be joining the company’s board. Vignes’ most recent stints were as CFO of Amret and other multinational corporations prior to that.
Clik also named Olivier Mermet as Chief Design and Strategy Officer. Mermet is a brand strategy and customer experience specialist who was previously a Brand Design Director at Procter & Gamble and a VP of Design, Retail and Customer Experience at Estée Lauder.
Denver Gibson, previously Clik’s deputy CTO, has also been promoted to CTO. Co-founder and Ex-CTO Darren Jensen remain with Clik as a Blockchain technology advisor to aid Clik’s development in that sector.
Matthew Maddocks has joined Clik’s board as Independent Director, chairing the Risk and Compliance Committee.