Pluang is an online investment application developed and operating in the Indonesian territory. Recently, the super-investment application was able to generate around $55 million in a funding event. The biggest contributor to the application is Accel, a venture capital firm operating out of California that has invested in several ventures in India, China, London, and San Francisco.
Pluang was able to attract attention from many major fintech players like Jeffery Zirlin, The Chainsmokers, Axie Infinity co-founders, and COO of Monzo Shujata Bhatia. The current year has been nominated as an opportune time for the growth and development of the Fintech sector in South East Asia. By 2021 end, the fintech sector from South Asia generated revenue of $6 billion.
Ethan Choi is the top executive from Accel. Speaking on the investment, he claimed that the recent success of Pluange in Indonesia is the reflection of the massive success and growth potential of the fintech sector in the southeast Asian sector. He also claimed that 2021 was going to prove to the fintech boom ear for the Latin American region.
Pluang is the brainchild of Claudia Kolonas and Richard Chua after a Harvard met up. The first trading commodity offered by Pluang was gold as an online trading asset. After getting a good response from the market, the application expanded to indexes, cryptocurrencies, and mutual fund options. The total number of gold investors in Indonesia is 16 times greater in comparison to equities. At present, 80 million gold traders are present in the country.
The Pluang application also allows investors in Indonesia to invest in US stocks. However, Kolonas, one of the co-founders of the trading application, claims that she is planning to add support for options trading products like ETFs and stocks. She also told the media that cryptocurrencies were added as a mild portfolio diversification option at first.
However, the 10 million crypto traders in the country soon became a big market for digital asset products. Chua, the other co-founder of the application, claims that developers are working on introducing support for NFTs, Defi, and digital asset wallets as the application keep moving closer to mimicking the functionality of a crypto exchange. Meanwhile, investors of Pluang do not have the option to directly withdraw their digital assets from the platform.