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- 🥷🏻 Investree’s shocking downfall: fraud, scandals, and a missing CEO
🥷🏻 Investree’s shocking downfall: fraud, scandals, and a missing CEO
CEO Fled, Company Dead
Admond Lee
March 16, 2025
Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.
Today’s story is about how one of the largest P2P lenders in Indonesia collapsed due to leadership misconduct and poor governance. Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Investree
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Leadership misconduct & poor governance
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Build your governance framework early (not after you’re in trouble)
🔗 The Runway Insights → How to make $10k/month by building AI agents
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → JigsawStack, a Singapore-based AI platform, raises $1M (Pre-Seed) to transform AI deployment
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Investree
🚀 The Rise of Investree
🇮🇩 Founded by Adrian Gunadi, Amir Amiruddin, and Lim Kok Chuan in 2015, Investree wanted to revolutionise SME financing in Indonesia.
The Problem — 💸 SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in Indonesia struggled to access adequate financing through traditional banking channels.
Many Indonesian SMEs faced significant hurdles in obtaining the necessary capital due to stringent banking requirements and limited credit histories.
The Solution — 💰 Investree bridged the gap between underserved SMEs and potential lenders with an online marketplace that matched people who wanted to invest money with businesses that needed to borrow, building a more inclusive financial ecosystem.
🤝🏻 Investree's platform offered a suite of lending products tailored for SMEs, including invoice financing, working capital term loans, buyer financing, and micro-business loans.
⚡️ By leveraging technology, they streamlined the lending process, making it more accessible and efficient for businesses that traditionally struggled to secure funding.
💪🏻 What made Investree particularly distinctive was its offering of both conventional and Shariah-compliant financing options, catering to Indonesia's diverse market needs.
🏦 In short, Investree was like Funding Societies (P2P lenders) — an online marketplace that provided financing to Indonesians’ SMEs by connecting lenders (retail investors like you and me) with SMEs that wanted to borrow money.
 A vendor displays her merchandise at a market in Tanjung Pinang, Indonesia. | 🤝🏻 The problem was huge. And It was a win-win:
Did SMEs love it? You bet. |
📈 By September 2021, Investree had shown remarkable traction, distributing an impressive 1.8 trillion rupiah (~$125 million) in just the first 8 months of that year alone.
Not just that, by October 2023, Investree claimed to have facilitated more than 14 trillion rupiah ($900 million) in loans since its inception. These weren't just empty numbers – they represented thousands of SMEs gaining access to much-needed capital.
💰 At its peak, Investree announced a massive $231 million Series D funding round led by Qatar's JTA International Holdings. It was unstoppable when Investree was fully licensed by Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK) and backed by huge capital, transforming from a local Indonesian startup to a regional fintech leader with multinational operations.
📉 The Fall of Investree
🌳 Investree was growing taller and bigger… until it wasn’t.
While the company projected confidence publicly, behind the scenes, shit was happening. Despite the announced Series D funding, the actual disbursement of these funds faced significant delays. This created liquidity pressures at a time when the company desperately needed capital.
📉 More alarmingly, Investree's loan portfolio quality was deteriorating rapidly. By early 2024, its non-performing loan (NPL) rate had reached a concerning 16% (far exceeding Indonesia's regulatory maximum of 5%). This dangerous trend suggested fundamental flaws in the company's credit scoring system and raised questions about its risk management practices.
📌 Here’s what happened to Investree:
The revocation of Investree's business license was mainly due to violations of minimum equity and other provisions as stipulated in OJK Regulation No.10/POJK.05/2022 on Information Technology-Based Joint Funding Services (LPBBTI), as well as deteriorating performance that disrupted operations and services to the public.
🌱🪴🌳 The Financial Inclusion
Oct 2015 — Investree was founded by Adrian Gunadi, Amir Amiruddin, and Lim Kok Chuan.
2015-2019 — Period of early growth establishing the P2P lending model in Indonesia.
Apr 2020 — 💰 Secured $23.5 million (Series C) co-led by BRI Ventures and MUFG Innovation Partners.
Mar 2021 — 🌏 Expanded operations to Thailand and the Philippines.
Sep 2021 — 🤝🏻 Reported distributing 1.8 trillion rupiah in the first 8 months of 2021.
Aug 2022 — Acquired an 18.4% stake in Amar Bank to accelerate financial inclusion.
Oct 2023 — 💰💰 Funding + Loan Disbursements
Announced a $231 million (Series D) — which was never fully disbursed.
🤝🏻 Reported total loan disbursements of more than 14 trillion rupiah ($900 million).
🥵 The Financial Crisis
Early 2024 — 🚨 Non-performing loan (NPL) rate reached 16%, more than 3x of Indonesia's 5% regulatory limit.
Because of this sky-high NPL, Investree has been facing heavy regulatory pressure for its problematic loan book.
17 Jan 2024 — Extraordinary general meeting to discuss leadership changes due to growing dissatisfaction among shareholders with Gunadi’s leadership.
Longtime Chief of Sales Salman Baharuddin was reportedly slated to replace Gunadi.
31 Jan 2024 — ⚠️ Adrian Gunadi was officially terminated as CEO following misconduct allegations as reported by DealStreetAsia.
😱 Gunadi had allegedly diverted funds from Investree to his personal account and used his position to make the lending firm a guarantor for a personal company.
In a statement, Investree said that entities under the names of PT Putra Radhika Investama and PT Radhika Persada Utama are not its affiliates, and that Investree did not serve as a guarantor for either entity.
Mar 2024 — 🙏🏻 Announcement of major restructuring plans under new leadership to support its struggling debtors and stabilise the company.
However, these efforts came too late.
The combination of leadership misconduct, high NPLs, and failure to meet regulatory requirements had already placed Investree under intense scrutiny from Indonesian authorities.
21 Oct 2024 — 🪓 OJK revoked Investree's business license because it failed to meet the required minimum equity of 7.5 billion rupiah (~$480,000), raising concerns about its ability to continue serving the public.
The revocation of its business license by OJK marked the end of its operations.
22 Oct 2024 — 🥶 OJK announced intentions to freeze Gunadi's bank accounts, trace his assets, and "pursue all necessary steps to ensure accountability".
25 Feb 2025 — 🇶🇦🏎️ Surprisingly, 5 months later, Gunadi was spotted at a car race in Qatar, despite being enforced by OJK to return to Indonesia (on the run?).
Will Gunadi return to Indonesia soon? We shall see…
😪 Once again, despite Investree being founded with genuine intentions to solve real financial inclusion problems for Indonesian SMEs, it collapsed due to the combination of alleged leadership misconduct, inadequate risk management leading to high NPLs, and failure to maintain regulatory compliance.
🧠 My 2 cents:
- I’ve written a few failed startup stories in Indonesia, including eFishery, Octopus, and TaniHub.
- Time and time again, one of the most common reasons why they collapsed was due to a lack of fundamental governance and corporate oversight.
- While governance and oversight are important, in my opinion, this is actually a syndrome to a deeper problem — ecosystem.
- Inexperienced founders might have received huge sums of money and didn’t know how to handle the fund, pressure, think and act rationally. We may blame their characters, but I strongly believe character is built by our environment and upbringing — again, back to the ecosystem.
- Investors might have put too much pressure on founders to grow at all costs, sometimes beyond the moral code.
- So what’s the solution? Honestly, I don’t know. But one solution seems promising to me, and that’s founder coaching by current/ex founders who are operators.
- Why? Based on Ray Dalio’s Principles, we can significantly improve the quality of our decisions by simply asking questions and learning from believable people (current/ex founders) — people who have successfully accomplished a thing in questions at least 3x, and have great explanations of the cause-effect relationships that lead them to their conclusions.
- If you can learn from believable people, I guarantee you can significantly increase the probability of being right.
Want to learn more about Investree’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Amir Amiruddin, Adrian Gunadi, and Lim Kok Chuan
(left to right)
Mistake 1: Leadership misconduct & poor governance
Let's call this what it was — a massive breach of trust.
🚚 Adrian Gunadi, despite his impressive banking background, allegedly used Investree like a personal ATM, diverting company funds to his personal account and using the company as a guarantor for his personal businesses.
This isn't just bad leadership, it's potentially criminal behaviour.
🤦🏻♂️ What makes this particularly shocking is Gunadi's background — 18+ years in banking, including senior roles at major financial institutions. This wasn't a rookie founder who didn't know better. This was someone who should have known the rules and responsibilities of managing other people's money.
❌ The damage wasn't just financial — it destroyed trust with investors, regulators, and ultimately killed the business. And what happened after? While OJK was freezing his accounts and trying to hold him accountable, Gunadi was reportedly spotted at a car race in Qatar! Talk about reading the room wrong.
Mistake 2: Risk management failures
🚨 Investree's non-performing loan (NPL) rate hit 16% by early 2024 — that's more than triple Indonesia's regulatory limit of 5%. In P2P lending, your credit scoring and risk assessment are literally your core product. If those fail, everything fails.
The shocking part?
✍🏻 This happened despite Investree having been around since 2015. They had nearly a decade to perfect their underwriting models, yet their loan book quality deteriorated dramatically. This suggests either a desperate push for growth at the expense of quality, or fundamental flaws in their risk assessment methodology that somehow weren't addressed for years.
When your entire business is built on accurately assessing who to lend money to, a 16% default rate is game over — especially in a regulated environment like Indonesia where the maximum allowed is 5%.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Build your governance framework early (not after you’re in trouble)
The Indonesian fintech ecosystem is still maturing, which means founders need to be extra diligent about governance — perhaps even more so than in more established markets.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
👮🏻 Enforce strong corporate governance
Create a "Financial Controls Bible" from day one that outlines exactly who can access company funds, what approvals are needed, and what documentation must be kept. Update it as you grow.
Establish an independent financial oversight committee that includes at least one non-executive board member who reviews financial decisions above a certain threshold.
Implement a whistleblower policy with protection guarantees so employees can safely report concerns.
🤝🏻 Cultivate a culture of transparency
Regularly share performance metrics and decision-making rationales with both investors and employees. This builds trust and ensures accountability.
For example, Modalku (Funding Societies' Indonesian arm) has maintained much healthier NPL rates (less than 2%) and strong regulatory relationships by implementing strict internal controls.
Their co-founder and CEO Reynold Wijaya has emphasized transparency with regulators even when sharing difficult news — a stark contrast to Investree's approach of apparently ignoring regulatory warnings.
Lesson 2: Risk management is everything
In P2P lending business, your risk model is your product.
🇮🇩 Indonesia's lending landscape is uniquely challenging — limited credit bureau data, a large unbanked population, and diverse regional economic conditions. Building a risk assessment model that works here requires a deep understanding of these local nuances.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
💪🏻 Invest in a strong data-driven credit scoring system
Utilise advanced data analytics / AI to refine your risk models. Regularly update your algorithms to reflect the latest market conditions and borrower behaviours.
Implement regular stress testing of your loan book against economic downturns specific to Indonesia (like commodity price fluctuations that affect regional economies differently).
Build in "circuit breakers" that automatically pause lending in certain categories if default rates exceed predetermined thresholds.
🧐 Stringent risk assessment
Create multi-layer approval processes for larger loans or new borrower categories.
Amartha, another Indonesian P2P lender, has maintained much better loan performance despite focusing on the arguably riskier micro-SME segment.
How? They invested heavily in a hybrid online-offline model with field agents who verify borrower information in person — especially important in Indonesia where official financial documentation can be limited. This added operating cost pays off in dramatically better risk assessment.
Lesson 3: Indonesian regulatory relationships are make-or-break
🩸 In Indonesia's highly regulated financial sector, your relationship with OJK isn't just another stakeholder relationship — it's existential.
OJK has shown they're willing to completely shut down companies that violate regulations, and they've been particularly vigilant in the P2P lending space after numerous scandals.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🫡 Comply with regulatory requirements
Assign a dedicated regulatory affairs team member who builds personal relationships with OJK officials and stays ahead of regulatory changes.
Create a real-time compliance dashboard that tracks all regulatory requirements and alerts leadership well before any thresholds are approached.
Implement quarterly "regulatory health checks" conducted by independent third parties.
🤝🏻 Maintain open communication with regulators
JULO, a digital lending platform, has maintained strong regulatory standing by proactively aligning their product development with OJK's financial inclusion goals.
They regularly participate in OJK's financial literacy initiatives and maintain open communication channels with regulators, giving them early insight into regulatory shifts.
🔗 The Runway Insights
How to make $10k/month by building AI agents (Link)
The hidden cost of being perfect (Link)
The 2025 fundraising guide (Link)
The only way to stop rat race (Link)
An opinionated guide on which AI model to use in 2025 (Link)
How to build a high-performance sales culture (without burning out your team) (Link)
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
JigsawStack, a Singapore-based AI platform, raises $1M (Pre-Seed) to transform AI deployment (Link)
Elevarm, an Indonesian agritech, raises $4.25M (Pre-Series A) to elevate the productivity of farmers (Link)
Shoppable Business, a Filipino supply chain technology startup, raises $1.16M (Seed) to make procurement easier for businesses (Link)
Purple Style Labs, an Indian retailer firm, raises $40M (Series E) for domestic and international expansion plans (Link)
Okapi lands $2M to expand its zero-upfront solar financing in SEA (Link)
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That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
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