BDA advises Trusting Social on US$65m initial Series C capital raise

BDA Partners is pleased to announce that its client, Trusting Social (“TS”) has successfully raised US$65m as the initial close of its Series C funding round from the Sherpa Company Ltd, a subsidiary of Masan Group Corp (HOSE: MSN, “Masan”). BDA was the exclusive financial advisor to Trusting Social on the transaction.

Trusting Social is an AI TechFin company aspiring to democratize financial services through AI-based consumer insights and embedded finance. TS drives financial inclusion by providing credit insights covering a billion consumers to 170 financial institutions across Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines.

The strategic collaboration between Trusting Social and Masan intends to develop an AI-powered consumer tech platform. This will offer customized retail and financial products to 27 million families in Vietnam. It will provide convenient access to personalized fintech solutions for consumers, combining Masan’s offline-to-online vision with Trusting Social’s ability to democratize finance. The partnership will also enable Masan to drive efficiencies in its core business by leveraging Trusting Social’s AI capabilities in retail store selection, demand & supply planning, and product assortment & development.   

Trusting Social’s Founder and CEO, Nguyen Nguyen, PhD. said: “I am proud that a Vietnamese platform has created an innovative credit scoring AI and ML platform that financial institutions across Asia are utilizing to serve their consumers better. Our partnership with Masan is exciting since we broaden our platform from credit access to a total consumer life solution. Masan and Trusting Social have the same belief that Vietnam can create transformation and disruption on par with global peers.”

Masan’s CEO, Danny Le said: “Walmart has invested heavily to develop an AI and ML platform and has leveraged it to become the leading offline and online daily, consumer life platform. The Trusting Social partnership provides Masan a similar cutting-edge AI and ML platform but tailored for 100 million Vietnamese consumers. Our job together now is to develop it from a pure credit scoring use case to a holistic Consumer engine.” 

Jeff Acton, Partner and Head of Tech, BDA Partners, said: “We’re delighted to have advised Trusting Social on this exciting tie-up. This is a landmark transaction in the fintech sector in Asia, where BDA is seeing increasing deal activity, and building a track record.”

Anindita (Andi) Das, Managing Director, BDA Partners, said: “The strategic collaboration between Trusting Social and Masan reflects the accelerating trend in use of AI and Machine Learning to provide superior solutions to customers across diverse industries. We congratulate Trusting Social and Masan on their forward-thinking partnership.