QED Investors, a global venture capital firm focused on investing in financial services companies, announced its first investment in Southeast Asia. It led a $5 million pre-Series B round in Indonesia-based Pashouses, a fintech company that sits at the intersection of property and technology.

Pashouses is an end-to-end transactional marketplace for buying and selling houses in Jakarta, from brokerage and renovation to staging and mortgage.

“As we saw in India, the opportunities for companies to make immediate and lasting change is tremendous,” said QED Investors partner and head of Asia, Sandeep Patil. “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.”

Co-founded by Indoseia-born Junghans Tsani and Bin Anindita, Pashouses aims to create home ownership through technology. The company helps buyers to take the right call on investment while buying properties as per their choices. 

So far, it claims to have processed 12,000 seller submissions and facilitated 2,000 house visits from buyers, leading to 500 transactions.

"Owning a home is an important part of the 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 from fintech solutions in growth markets, especially in view of macroeconomic conditions globally," added Pashouses' chief executive officer Junghans Tasani. 

QED has invested in 12 proptech companies worldwide and believes that real estate is just one area prime for disruption in Indonesia. Globally, QED has invested in more than 200 companies across 18 countries.

“Some 40 per cent of Indonesians are unbanked today, meaning the potential to help democratize access to financial products for large swaths of the country is huge,” said Patil. “At the same time, smartphone penetration is almost 62 percent. The opportunity to serve a digitally native population and to build on existing infrastructure is growing every day.”

Founded in 2007, QED Investors has invested in 28 unicorns and has $4.3 billion under management. In September 2021, QED announced it had closed a substantially oversubscribed $1.05 billion fund, including $550 million in QED Fund VII for early-stage investments and $500 million in a new Growth Fund.

In December 2020, QED announced its entry into Asian markets. The company hired Sandeep Patil as partner and head of Asia. Patil is also the investment leader of the company in the Asian sub-continent.