Seedflex facilitates loans based on sales

Higher revenue means faster repayment terms.

Fintech startup Seedflex Technologies Pte Ltd. seeks to facilitate lending to 50,000 micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Malaysia by year-end based on their sales performance.

“Cash flow is a central part of micro and small businesses,” Seedflex co-founder and CEO Ritwik Ghosh told Singapore Business Review. “That is their asset, which has now become very widely digitised, cashless, and available for data understanding, available for credit underwriting.”

“We are building at the centre of that with the pay-as-you-sell concept,” he said via Zoom.

Seedflex’s platform, called Pay-As-You-Sell Advance, lets merchants access funding via its 12 partners, with borrowing limits and repayments based on their sales. It had 6,000 merchants in Malaysia as of June.

“It is not based on a fixed monthly repayment schedule,” Ghosh said. “If their sales go higher, they pay back faster. If sales go lower, they pay back, to a certain extent, slower.”

Sauvik Datta, co-founder and chief operating officer at the Singapore startup, said repayment occurs “almost daily,” as a share of each sale goes toward repaying the loan.

Although it helps small businesses access credit, Seedflex doesn’t position itself as a credit fintech, Datta said. Rather, it integrates into existing ecosystems that merchants already use, providing insight into their cash flow.

Seedflex plans to use the $4.1m (US$3.2m) it raised from its seed extension round early this year to to continue scaling its growth in Malaysia and to support its expansion to Indonesia.

Ghosh said Seedflex is working on features that would let merchants use credit in different ways, whether for long- or short-term financing. It is also trying to attract more merchants.

“That is the direction that we are taking—to get closer to our partners and add more value to them,” he said.

Datta said the startup is also improving the “technology layer” of its business to boost efficiency and scale more effectively.

With its pay-as-you-sell model, Seedflex seeks to create a credit category similar to how Buy Now, Pay Later carved out its own space in the market.