QED investors directs a $5 million pre-series B investment in Indonesia- based Pashouses

• ByStartupStory     |    November 21, 2022

QED Investors, a global venture capital firm that specializes in funding financial services firms, recently disclosed the location of its first investment. It led a $5 million pre-Series B round in Pashouses, an Indonesian fintech firm at the nexus of real estate and technology.

Pashouses is a full-service transactional platform in Jakarta for buying and selling homes, including brokerage, remodeling, staging, and mortgage.

“As we saw in India, the opportunities for companies to make immediate and lasting change are tremendous,” said Sandeep Patil, partner and head of Asia for QED Investors. “Southeast Asia boasts a vast and growing economy. Taken together, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam would be the seventh-largest economy and third-most populous countries in the world. With a median age of 30 years, it is no wonder that smartphones are everywhere, and tech is being adopted across all walks of life.”

Pashouses, a technology-based real estate company, was formed by Bin Anindita and Junghans Tsani, both from Indonesia. The organization assists customers in making the best investment decision when choosing properties to buy. There have reportedly been 500 transactions as a result of processing 12,000 seller submissions and facilitating 2,000 buyer house visits.

“Owning a home is an important part of Indonesian culture, but the current structure is incredibly complex and fragmented,” said Patil. “There are no central databases for properties like the MLS in the U.S. Buyers search for homes in classified ads or through signs at the front of the house, sellers ask friends for referrals of brokers they have used in the past; agents drive around neighborhoods asking people one-on-one for leads on potential properties that might be available. Imagine buying a home before the internet. That is still largely the process in Indonesia today. The process is opaque, but digitization has the potential to remove a lot of this friction.”

“We are excited to tap into QED’s experience with fintech solutions in growth markets, especially in view of macroeconomic conditions globally,” added Junghans Tasani, the chief executive of Pashouses. Real estate in Indonesia is only one of many industries in which QED has invested that it thinks is ready for disruption. QED has invested in 12 proptech businesses globally. Over 200 enterprises in 18 different countries have received investments from QED globally. “Some 40 percent of Indonesians are unbanked today, meaning the potential to help democratize access to financial products for large swaths of the country is huge,” stated Patil. “At the same time, smartphone penetration is almost 62 percent. The opportunity to serve a digitally native population and build on existing infrastructure is growing daily.”

QED Investors was established in 2007 and had $4.3 billion under management. They have invested in 28 unicorns. Including $550 million in QED Fund VII for early-stage investments and $500 million in a new Growth Fund, QED announced in September 2021 that it had closed a $1.05 billion fund that had been significantly oversubscribed. QED made an announcement about entering the Asian markets in December 2020. As a partner and regional manager for Asia, the company engaged Sandeep Patil. Additionally, Patil oversees the firm’s investments on the Asian continent.

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