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  • 🤯 Why Indonesia's Ringan Chose to Shut Down With Rp 16.8 Billion Still in the Bank

🤯 Why Indonesia's Ringan Chose to Shut Down With Rp 16.8 Billion Still in the Bank

Backed by Ping An, licensed by OJK, a million people on its waitlist — and Ringan still chose to fold while solvent instead of burning the cash on a turnaround.

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Admond Lee
June 21, 2026

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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.

The best product rarely wins. The one that's easiest to adopt does.

I had Ace, the founder of TradingFXVPS, on our podcast — and his company is that lesson in action.

Trading brokerages want to offer their clients fast, always-on trading servers. But building that infrastructure is a months-long project most never start. TradingFXVPS turns it into a single line of code — set up automatically, live in days.

Today's story is about how Ringan voluntarily shut down with a 1 million user waitlist and Rp 18.89B still in the bank. Let's get to it! 🚀

Today at a Glance:

  • ☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Ringan

  • ⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Built a Tier-1 cost base for a tiny loan book

  • 🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Leverage your unfair advantage

  • 🔗 The Runway Insights → How to build your AI GTM system

  • 💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Pints AI raises $5.6M (Pre-Series A) to scale auditable AI in finance

☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Ringan

🚀 The Rise of Ringan

🇮🇩 Founded in 2019 by Yudhono Rawis as a corporate venture backed by Lufax Holdings and Ping An Insurance Group, Ringan was an Indonesian P2P lending platform that helped consumers and small businesses get fast, unsecured cash loans through a mobile app.

🕺🏻 Founders’ Story

Before Ringan, Yudhono Rawis spent close to 16 years at KPMG Indonesia, eventually running their M&A practice.

He was the kind of guy who could untangle a balance sheet in his sleep. But he kept staring at Indonesia's credit gap — millions of people locked out of bank loans because they had no collateral, no credit history, and nowhere to go.

📱 In 2019, he left KPMG to lead Ringan, a Lufax / Ping An-backed lender built around one simple mission → "Jalani Hidup Dengan Ringan" (Live life lightly).

  • The Problem — 🤦🏻‍♂️ A huge chunk of Indonesians simply couldn't borrow money the normal way.

    • ILO data put private credit at just 25% of GDP — most consumers and MSMEs were locked out of formal lending.

    • Banks demanded collateral and credit history that millions of borrowers didn't have.

    • The vacuum was getting filled by illegal loan apps (pinjol ilegal) charging predatory rates.

  • The Solution — 📱🤑 Ringan built a fully paperless mobile lending app for unsecured cash loans with loans up to Rp 20 million and tenors from 3 to 12 months without collateral required.

    • AI-driven eKYC, automated underwriting, and risk scoring powered by OneConnect — Ping An's fintech arm.

🇮🇩💳 In short, Ringan was Ping An's bet on Indonesia — a fully licensed, AI-powered lender trying to bank the unbankable.

Yudhono Rawis (ex-CEO of Ringan)

🔥 Ringan came out of the gate with deep corporate pockets, real technology, and the kind of compliance posture most fintech founders dream of.

✅ On 2 Aug 2021, OJK granted Ringan a full operational license — one of only ~77 fully licensed P2P lenders out of 164 registered in Indonesia at the time.

Then the numbers started moving fast.

🤝🏻 Just weeks later, Ringan announced its OneConnect integration with 200,000+ registered users and over Rp 10 billion already disbursed. By September, the team was prepping a new MSME-focused product, RinganKTA, to ride OJK's productive lending mandate.

Then came the big one. In January 2022, Ringan announced a partnership with Lippo Group to tap into their massive retail, property, and healthcare ecosystem.

🏔️ At its peak, Ringan:

  • crossed Rp 50 billion in cumulative loan disbursements

  • served 5,000-10,000 active borrowers

  • had a 1 million-user waitlist for financing (per CEO Rawis)

  • ran with ~100 employees out of Sequis Center in South Jakarta

  • held a coveted full OJK license (fewer than half of all P2P startups had one)

🏦 From the outside, Ringan looked like the rare combination → corporate-grade backing, real AI tech, regulatory compliance, and a million people lined up to borrow.

📉 The Fall of Ringan

But after January 2022, the story went quiet.

The press releases stopped. The waitlist stopped getting mentioned. The growth numbers stopped coming.

🥶 And then, 3 years later, Ringan handed its license back to OJK — with Rp 17.89 billion still sitting on the balance sheet and zero rupiah owed to lenders.

📌 Here’s what happened to Ringan:

❝

2022 still holds a lot of uncertainty... Ringan is ready to soar, the infrastructure is there, the capital is there, it's just a matter of how...

— shared by Yudhono Rawis in a January 2022 interview


🤑 No money? No worries…

  • 2018 — 🏗️ PT Ringan Teknologi Indonesia was incorporated in Jakarta as a corporate venture backed by China's Ping An Insurance Group and Lufax Holdings.

  • Jul 2019 — Yudhono Rawis joined as CEO and President Director after ~16 years at KPMG Indonesia.

  • 20 Dec 2019 — Ringan officially registered with OJK as a fintech P2P lending platform.

  • 2 Aug 2021 — ✅ OJK granted Ringan a full permanent operational license (Decree No. KEP-65/D.05/2021).

  • 24 Aug 2021 — 🤝🏻 Announced strategic deployment of OneConnect's AI-driven eKYC, fraud detection, and automated underwriting.

    • At this point → 200,000+ registered users, 100,000+ KTP scans, Rp 10 billion+ disbursed.

  • 7 Sep 2021 — Announced plans to expand into productive MSME loans via the new "RinganKTA" product.

  • 27 Jan 2022 — 🤝🏻 Announced synergistic partnership with Lippo Group to tap MSME markets across Lippo's retail, property, and healthcare ecosystem.

  • Jan 2022 — 📈 Peak traction → Rp 50 billion disbursed to 5,000-10,000 borrowers, 1 million-user waitlist awaiting financing.

 🤐 3 years of silence, and…

  • May 2022 — ⚠️ Founding CEO Yudhono Rawis quietly departed Ringan to join Binance as a Portfolio Company CEO (later interim CEO of Tokocrypto).

  • 2022-2023 — 🤐 Public silence. No major Ringan-driven media updates, no new growth metrics, no funding announcements.

  • Mar 2023 — Johnny Widodo (ex-OVO, ex-OLX Indonesia, ex-TaniHub) joined as new CEO with a mandate to steer the company through tougher conditions.

  • 2023-2024 — 📉 Indonesia's P2P sector started deteriorating sharply.

    • Industry TWP90 (90+ day default ratio) climbed from 2.52% toward 4.33%.

    • OJK raised minimum capital requirements to Rp 12.5 billion by July 2025 and pushed lenders toward a 60% productive-lending portfolio mix.

    • Maucash, Pinjam Modal, Dhanapala, Investree, TaniFund — competitor after competitor shut down or had licenses revoked.

  • Early 2025 — 🛑 Internal evaluation between Ringan management and shareholders (Lufax / Ping An) concluded that continuing operations would result in sustained, unrecoverable losses.

  • 24 Apr 2025 — 🚫 OJK officially revoked PT Ringan Teknologi Indonesia's license at the company's own request (Decree No. KEP-17/D.06/2025).

  • 6 May 2025 — OJK publicly announced the revocation. The number of licensed fintech lenders in Indonesia fell to 96 (down from a peak of 164 in December 2019).

  • 24 Jul 2025 — Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders (RUPSLB) formally approved dissolution. SSEK Law Firm appointed as official liquidator.

  • 30 Oct 2025 — 📋 Liquidation team published the interim balance sheet:

    • Rp 18.89 billion in total assets (Rp 16.8B cash, Rp 1.61B prepaid taxes, Rp 465.85M lease deposits)

    • Rp 1.0 billion in liabilities

    • ~Rp 17.89 billion in equity still on the books

    • Zero outstanding obligations to lenders

Most Indonesian fintech lender collapses have been brutal. Investree reportedly got its license yanked with creditors left holding the bag. TaniFund reportedly left lenders with bad debt and an OJK investigation. Borrowers burned, lawsuits flying — the usual mess.

🤔 Ringan? They shut down with Rp 16.8 billion in cash still in the bank.

🙏🏻 It had real demand. 1 million people lined up for loans. A full OJK license. Ping An tech under the hood. But the unit economics never worked — and rather than burn the rest of the equity chasing a turnaround, the corporate parent ran the numbers and chose to fold the hand before the chips ran out.

In a market where staying in the game often means dragging customers and lenders down with you, walking away whole is its own kind of win. 🫡

Want to learn more about Ringan’s downfall?

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Mistake 1: Built a Tier-1 cost base for a tiny loan book

Ringan had everything most fintech founders dream of → a full OJK license (one of only ~77 in the country), ~100 employees in a Sequis Center HQ, OneConnect's AI underwriting stack, and a 1 million-user waitlist.

But at peak, they'd only deployed Rp 50 billion in cumulative loans — while top P2P competitors were disbursing over Rp 1 trillion.

🤦🏻‍♂️ With 5,000-10,000 active borrowers, a Rp 20 million max ticket, and interest at ~1.5%/month, the math just didn't work:

  • Cumulative loans (~Rp 50B) were a small fraction of top P2P competitors' (>Rp 1T)

  • ~100 staff in a Sequis Center HQ supported that loan book

  • A 1M-user waitlist sat alongside only 5,000–10,000 active borrowers

⚠️ The cost base and the loan book sat on very different curves, and the unit economics never had a path to working.

Mistake 2: Defaulted to commoditised consumer loans for 2 years

For its first 2+ years, Ringan competed in unsecured Kredit Multiguna.

But here's the weird part 🤔

Ringan was a corporate venture backed by Lufax Holdings (an associate company of Ping An Insurance Group), and a later Lippo Group partnership opened access to a captive retail, property, and healthcare MSME network.

Yet the MSME-focused RinganKTA product was only announced in September 2021 — after 2 years of refining the cash loan product.

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Build a cost base your loan book can amortise

In regulated lending, your fixed costs don't care how many people downloaded your app — they only care how much you've deployed.

Ringan had the team, the license, and the AI stack. By early 2022, the company had disbursed over Rp 50 billion to between 5,000 and 10,000 borrowers. The 1M-user waitlist was great PR, but registered users don't pay the compliance bill.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • In regulated lending, fixed costs only amortise across deployed loans, not registered users.

  • Demand is not a moat — only deployment is an economic event.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🌏 Avoid the "infrastructure ahead of deployment" trap

    • Top Indonesian P2P lenders deployed Rp 1 trillion+ in loan books — Ringan disbursed just over Rp 50 billion to 5,000–10,000 borrowers by early 2022.

    • Every 10 people you hire should map to a specific, deliverable increase in deployed volume.

    • Treat a 1M-user waitlist as a marketing data point. Until those users become loans on the book, they don't move your unit economics.

Lesson 2: Leverage your unfair advantage

For 2 years, Ringan competed in unsecured consumer cash loans instead of leveraging the structural edges they had — AI underwriting, conglomerate networks, eventually Lippo's MSME ecosystem.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • A backer's structural advantage only counts in markets where that advantage actually compounds.

  • Pick the wedge where your unfair edge materially shifts the unit economics.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🧠 Map your backer's actual edge to your market choice

    • List every structural advantage your shareholders bring: proprietary tech, data, distribution, capital cost.

    • If your wedge doesn't use 2+ of those advantages, you're competing as a generalist with extra overhead.

  • 🌏 Study how corporate-backed SEA lenders picked their wedge

    • Funding Societies (Modalku) and Bank Jago are useful case studies for how wedge choice can map to a backer's structural edge.

    • If you can't name your top 3 unfair advantages and the specific market where each one materially shifts unit economics, you haven't chosen a wedge yet.

Lesson 3: The risk of leadership gap is high

The founding CEO left in May 2022.

A replacement CEO joined in March 2023, with prior CEO roles in agritech, classifieds, and used cars — all while sector defaults were climbing and OJK was tightening capital rules.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

  • A leadership gap during a cycle inversion compounds risk faster than any product mistake.

  • Domain depth matters most when the playbook needs rewriting under time pressure.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

  • 🚨 Treat regulated-industry CEO transitions as 90-day decisions

    • Every quarter without a domain-fluent CEO in a regulated lender is a quarter of unmanaged credit risk.

    • If your founding CEO signals an exit, lock down a domain-experienced successor before the 90-day mark.

    • For the interim, lean on someone from the internal credit or risk team — not a generalist board member.

🔗 The Runway Insights

  • How to build your AI GTM system (Read)

  • How to pivot well(Read)

  • Climbing the wrong mountain: When founders build around familiar problems (Read)

  • How AI search grounding actually works: Google vs OpenAI vs Anthropic (Read)

💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar

  • Pints AI raises $5.6M (Pre-Series A) to scale auditable AI in finance (More)

  • TrueFan AI raises $10M (Series A) to expand its enterprise AI video generation platform into new global markets (More)

  • HyperNorm AI secures $2.2M (Seed) to build AI-driven decision intelligence software for wealth advisors and expand platform capabilities (More)

  • I.W.G bags $1.8M (Pre-Series A) to develop software enabling medical data sharing and interoperability across Asia (More)

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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

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.

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