For small and medium sized entities (SMEs), there is nothing as difficult and nerve-racking as waiting for clients to pay their invoices. While businesses in mature markets have access to various financing options, such as bank credit lines or invoice factoring, businesses in emerging markets only have few alternatives to bridging short-term credit gaps: defer payments to employees or taking out loans at excessive rates. In Southeast Asia alone, there are over 70,000,000 SMEs and yet most banks offer financing services exclusively to their largest corporate clients. Acudeen picks up what these banks left behind by offering a decentralized marketplace for SMEs to liquidate movable assets, such as invoices and short-term cashflow needs, without putting their entire business on the line. Acudeen started off in 2016 and has since then helped micro, small and medium-sized entities (MSMEs) to finance their 30-120 day receivables ahead of time. In less than two years, invoices totaling over US $2.4m has changed ownership and provided liquidity to over 400 MSMEs. Individuals and corporates purchasing those invoices benefited from attractive returns for short-term cash.
The early success and its economic impact in emerging markets has been recognized with numerous rewards, incl. being named Winner of the Global Seedstars Summit 2017. With recent market entry into Myanmar, Acudeen embarked on an ambitious expansion plan and will operate in four markets before the end of the year. Acudeen was inspired by its founder’s personal experience running a medium-sized business and the frustrating process to survive as an entrepreneur due to the poor payment behavior of its clients. This translated into the vision of building a leading marketplace for SMEs to turn movable assets into cash in a matter of 3-5 days when needed. Leveraging blockchain technology, the existing platform, which focuses on invoices, will be expanded to other movable assets, such as cars, warehouse receipts, etc. As distributed technologies and sharing economies collide, we see a revolutionary opportunity to redefine movable assets by reducing their ‘time-to-cash’ to seconds, eventually making it as liquid as cash itself. In order to expand this ecosystem of trusted parties and standardize the units to pay for various services, Acudeen introduces the ACU token. The token will be the only means to pay for services received on Acudeen’s movable asset marketplace.
