For investors
Ten million Filipinos belong to a cooperative. Almost none of them run on software.
Cooperatives are how millions of families here shop, borrow, farm, keep the lights on, and get to work. They handle real money every day on cash, paper, and spreadsheets, which is why so much of it goes missing. Panta is the software that runs them: it takes the payment, keeps a record nobody can quietly change, closes the books, and produces the reports their regulator asks for. It is built, it is running, and it works for every kind of cooperative.
- 10M
- Filipinos are members of registered cooperatives
- ₱407B
- in cooperative financial offerings, Philippines
- 7.6M
- members in the largest single federation network, across more than a thousand cooperatives
- 81%
- of transport franchises now consolidated into cooperatives, creating hundreds of new ones
CDA, 2022
CDA, 2022
Public record, September 2024
LTFRB, May 2024
Why now
The sector is being told to modernise, and it has nothing to modernise onto.
The paperwork is going digital
The cooperative regulator has moved reporting online (CDA Memorandum Circular 2025-02) and tightened how cooperatives are inspected (2024-10). Cooperatives that have kept their books by hand for decades are being asked for records they have no practical way to produce. That obligation lands on every type of cooperative, not on one sector.
Nobody builds software for them
Banking and retail systems are priced for banks and retailers. A cooperative running a shop in a provincial town, or lending small amounts to farmers, cannot buy or operate them. So the sector stays on cash and spreadsheets, and the losses stay invisible.
One sector is being forced first
Transport shows the pattern most sharply: a national program requires operators to join cooperatives to keep working, and 81 percent had by May 2024 (LTFRB), creating hundreds of brand new cooperatives with obligations and no systems. In Davao, an ADB-financed program is modernising the city on a schedule. That program buys its own bus fare system; the cooperatives it creates are left to equip themselves. That is one of the doors, not the building: we serve every cooperative type and give none of them priority.
What we built
Not a deck. A running platform.
Twelve backend services, four role-specific portals, a member app, and validator software for low-cost Android hardware, live in its production cloud environment today. The flow below is not an architecture diagram. It is what we demonstrate, end to end, in the briefing.
The member app
Panta Card
₱482.60
Regular member · Card linked
Live code · renews itself
The member's card, balance, live payment code, store, and full activity. Pays by QR or a phone tap; a printed card covers members without smartphones.
The operator portal
Each line traces to signed records · illustrative figures
Signing up members, taking payments, issuing bills, running the store and its price list, and seeing exactly where the money came from. One of four portals, each built for a different role.
The record underneath
{
"event_type":
"CooperativeCreditRedeemed",
"amount_minor": 24500,
"currency": "PHP",
"reason": "shop:groceries",
"cooperative": "coop-example",
"collected_by": "counter-02",
"sequence": 84206,
"signature": "ed25519:9f2c…"
}Every peso, whatever the member paid for, is this underneath: signed where it was collected, in order, permanent. Money going missing quietly is not a policy we forbid. It is something the records make visible.
These are styled recreations of the running product, drawn for the web. The briefing uses the real thing: the portals, the app, and the hardware in hand.
A ledger nobody can quietly edit
Every fare, purchase, bill, and payout is an individually signed, append-only record. Reports are computed from evidence, not compiled from claims. That is the product, for the cooperative and for its regulator alike.
Takes payment where there is no signal
A member can pay at a counter, a store, or a vehicle with the internet down, and the record still holds. The system catches up on its own when the connection returns. Built for brownouts and dead zones, because that is where these cooperatives operate.
Settlement that cannot double-pay
The books close automatically every day. Payout instructions are generated exactly once per cycle by construction, with a full signed audit trail.
The regulator is a user, not a recipient
Government authorities get their own read-only portal and serve themselves verified reports. Compliance evidence is generated continuously, not assembled quarterly.
One card for everything the member does
The co-op store, the electricity bill, dues, a ride: one account, one card, one app, with a printed card for members who have no smartphone. Each service a cooperative switches on runs on the same account.
Hardware the market can afford
Low-cost Android devices and a web browser. No proprietary terminals, no IT department, no metro-rail price tag. The cost structure matches cooperative economics.
What we actually do
A cooperative is a business owned by the people who use it. We run the software behind it.
In the Philippines this is not a niche. Ten million people belong to one. They are how families buy their groceries, pay the electricity bill, borrow money, sell their harvest, and get to work. A cooperative can be a shop, a small lender, a power utility, a farming association, a fleet of jeepneys, or several of those at once.
Nearly all of them still run on cash, paper receipts, and a spreadsheet. Money goes missing between the member's hand and the co-op's account, and nobody can prove where. Panta is one system that takes the payment, keeps the record, and produces the reports their regulator asks for. Here is what that looks like for each kind of cooperative.
Shops
Co-op grocery and retail stores
A member buys their groceries and pays with their card at the counter, or orders in the app and collects. The sale is on the co-op's books the moment it happens. No cash drawer to reconcile at closing time.
Working today
Electricity and water
Utility co-ops that supply the household
The co-op issues a bill. It gets paid the moment the member has the money in their account, automatically. Nobody has to walk door to door collecting, and nobody gets cut off over a payment that was made but never recorded.
Working today
Savings and loans
Credit co-ops, the biggest part of the sector
The co-op knows exactly who every member is and can prove where every peso went, which is what its regulator asks for and what most of them currently assemble by hand. Running the actual savings and loans comes once the rules for it are agreed.
Records today, lending next
Farming
Agricultural co-ops
Farmers buy seed, feed, and fertiliser on their card at the co-op counter. Paying farmers for the harvest they deliver is being designed together with the co-ops, because the money side of that is theirs to define, not ours to guess.
Buying today, selling next
Transport
Jeepney and bus co-ops
Passengers tap a card to pay. The fare goes straight onto the co-op's books instead of into somebody's pocket, and the co-op can see which route, which vehicle, and which driver earned it.
Working today
All of the above
Multi-purpose co-ops, very common here
Plenty of cooperatives do several of these at once: a store, a lending arm, and a fleet. One card for the member, one set of books for the co-op, and the co-op turns on only the parts it actually runs.
Working today
The same card, the same account, and the same set of books cover all of it. A member who joins to buy groceries can pay a bill, take a loan, and ride to work on the same card, and the cooperative only turns on the parts it runs. That is why this is one business and not six.
Where a card above says “next”, it means exactly that: designed, sequenced, and not yet built. Everything marked “working today” can be shown running.
The regulatory position
A sequencing advantage, taken deliberately.
Panta's instrument is cooperative-credit: closed-loop, redeemable only by members of the issuing cooperative, under the cooperative code (RA 9520). The central bank's rules place it outside e-money regulation, in writing. We present that for what it is: not a wall around us, but speed and capital efficiency for our customers. No e-money licence and no EMI capital requirement stands between a cooperative and going live.
What we treat as defensible is different: the cooperative authority is our primary regulator and a designed-in user (their own read-only portal, evidence computed from the signed record), the closed-loop boundary is enforced by the software itself, and the record a cooperative accumulates on Panta is the thing it can least afford to walk away from. Regulatory trust and switching costs are earned assets. The carve-out is just the door they walk through.
And closed-loop is the first act, not the ceiling: the platform is architected for a second, licensed track for general-purpose payments, to be pursued with the central bank when scale justifies the capital. That sequencing, cooperative authority first, central bank second, is the strategy.
BSP Circular 1166, Section 1
“E-money issued under closed-loop electronic wallet systems is not covered by this Section.”
The instrument is proven
Closed-loop mutual credit has run real economies for generations: WIR Bank in Switzerland since 1934 (around 60,000 SME members and roughly CHF 1.4 billion in annual turnover at its 2013 peak), and Sardex in Sardinia since 2010, regulated under cooperative law. Nobody has industrialised this instrument for the developing world's cooperative economies. That is the category Panta is building.
The obvious question
Members already have GCash. Why isn't that enough?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that a payment app plus a spreadsheet is exactly what many cooperatives use today. That combination moves money; it does not run a cooperative. It cannot take a payment when the internet is down, apply the discount a member is legally entitled to, tell the co-op which of its people collected what, refuse a transaction that would break cooperative law, close the books each day, or hand the regulator evidence it can check itself. And the spreadsheet half can be edited by anyone who has the file.
Panta is not a rival payment app competing for the member's pesos; it is the cooperative's operating record. The domestic rails members already use, GCash and Maya among them, are integrated as top-up sources in the software, switched on per deployment as commercial connections land. The rail moves value in. The record of what happened, who earned it, and where it settled: that is Panta, and it is the part nobody else builds for cooperatives.
The model
Sell to the federation. Grow with the member.
Panta sells to federations and cooperatives as infrastructure: business software, priced to cooperative economics, with commercial terms agreed per federation. A federation brings its member cooperatives; an approved cooperative is live on the platform in minutes, with no technical work on their side.
The growth mechanics compound instead of restarting: each new service a cooperative switches on deepens the same member account rather than acquiring a new user, and each new cooperative a federation admits joins records, settlement, and reporting that already exist. Acquisition happens at the federation level; usage grows at the member level.
Pricing follows the kind of cooperative rather than pretending one price fits a village shop and a power utility alike. The full price card and the worked numbers are published in the next section. Federation-level terms are agreed with each federation.
Why this is hard to copy
- Regulatory nativity. The platform is built under cooperative law from the first line of code, with the closed-loop boundary enforced in software. Retrofitting that posture onto a payments app is a rebuild, not a feature.
- It works where the power cuts out. Taking payment and keeping a provable record on cheap hardware with no internet is the hard engineering. It is also the only version that works in the places these cooperatives actually operate.
- The trust asset. Every peso on the platform is evidence. The federation, the cooperative, the member, and the regulator all read the same numbers. Whoever holds that record becomes very hard to replace.
Unit economics
Priced on the right unit, worth a multiple of what it costs.
Every cooperative pays a monthly fee for the members it actually has, plus a small charge for the work the system actually does: a sale rung up, a bill paid, a trip taken. Most cooperatives earn us more on the membership line, because their members are the people using the service. A transport cooperative is the exception, since its members are the few hundred operators and drivers while its passengers belong to nobody's membership, so it pays mostly per trip. Charging on the right thing is what makes every number below honest.
The price card
| Cooperative type | Membership | Metered line | Monthly floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Savings and loans | ₱55 / member/mo | None | ₱25,000/mo |
| Multi-purpose | ₱30 / member/mo | ₱0.20 / trip (if it runs vehicles) | ₱15,000/mo |
| Farming | ₱20 / member/mo | Origination fees | ₱10,000/mo |
| Transport | ₱15 / member/mo | ₱0.20 / validated trip | ₱800 per vehicle/mo |
| Shops | ₱12 / member/mo | ₱0.15 / counter sale | ₱10,000/mo |
| Electricity and water | ₱8 / connection/mo | ₱0.15 / bill payment | ₱20,000/mo |
Across all types: credit servicing at 2% of principal originated plus 0.25% per month on outstanding, and hardware at a 15% supply margin plus ₱350 per device per month for maintenance. Modules switch on by the cooperative's official classification; the asset-size band sets the tier. Metered lines are software metering on the cooperative's invoice, never a cut of the fare or the bill, which is what keeps Panta outside payment-flow economics entirely.
Eighty percent of target revenue is subscriptions and credit servicing, both invoiced to the cooperative, neither touching member funds. The revenue model and the regulatory model are the same story.
Worked example: a savings and loans co-op
Three thousand members at ₱55 each is ₱165,000 a month, about USD 34,000 a year. It replaces the core banking licence the co-op already pays for and the regulatory reporting it currently assembles by hand. We are a cheaper line in an existing budget, not a new one they have to find.
Worked example: a transport co-op
A hundred-vehicle cooperative with 250 operator and driver members, validating 750,000 trips a month:
| Membership (250 × ₱15) | ₱3,750 |
| Trip metering (750,000 × ₱0.20) | ₱150,000 |
| Device maintenance (100 × ₱350) | ₱35,000 |
| Total | ₱188,750 |
That is 1.9% of the ₱9.75M the cooperative collects. Typical fare leakage runs around 20%; recovering just a third of it returns roughly ₱650,000 a month.
3.4× value returned per peso charged
Why transport still pays a membership line
That ₱3,750 is two percent of what the cooperative pays us, and it stays anyway. It is the membership-record and member-education contract, the thing that makes Panta a cooperative platform provider under the cooperative code rather than a fare-collection vendor. It is a cheap price for the regulatory frame it holds up.
The 24-month base
The seed milestones come to 26 cooperatives across five kinds: six savings and loans, five shops, four multi-purpose, one utility, and ten transport. Together they bill about ₱5.04M a month, roughly USD 1.04M a year, from about 137,000 cooperative members under contract plus 250,000 transport passengers, counted separately.
- 68-72%
- software gross margin at pilot scale, 80%+ at scale
- 11-17×
- five-year LTV to CAC by cooperative type, at 4% annual logo churn
- 3-6 mo
- payback on the cost of winning a cooperative, by type
- 80%
- of target revenue from subscriptions and credit servicing, invoiced to the cooperative
Figures are the operating model at current pricing, not audited results; Panta is pre-revenue and says so plainly above. Winning a cooperative through its federation costs roughly a third of winning it directly, which is why the go-to-market runs through federations.
Where we are
We will not show you a vanity metric. We will show you the system.
Panta is pre-pilot. There are no customers, volumes, or revenues to report yet, and you will not find any implied on this page. What exists is a complete, running platform ahead of a market whose arrival is written into law. Diligence can verify every claim here, and we would like it to.
Today
The platform is built and running in its production cloud environment: twelve services, four portals, the member app, validator and kiosk software, end to end. Pre-pilot, and demonstrable live.
Target Q4 2026
First deployments across the Visayas and Mindanao, with the cooperatives that are furthest along in needing it, whatever their type.
2027 and beyond
More cooperatives, and more kinds of cooperative, on the same platform, across the Visayas and Mindanao.
Built and running in its production cloud environment · pre-pilot · first deployments across the Visayas and Mindanao (target Q4 2026)
The ask
USD 6 million seed. Priced, milestone-tranched, and honest about what it buys.
Structured in two tranches: USD 2.5M at close, and USD 3.5M released on two named triggers, written CDA recognition of the closed-loop primitive and a signed federation-level contract with revenue. Twenty-four months of runway from the first tranche. Non-dilutive development-finance funding is pursued in parallel and never sits in the plan's critical path. Terms are discussed in the room, not published on a page.
Use of funds, 24 months
Engineering A CTO-grade founding engineer with meaningful equity, plus a Philippine engineering team | $1.3M |
Field operations & deployment Installation, training and cooperative success across the first pilot regions | $550K |
Regulatory & partnerships Counsel, the CDA/BSP/LTFRB workstreams, federation relationships, IP protection | $700K |
Cloud, security & SOC 2 Institutional diligence expects it; we budget it as a gate, not a nice-to-have | $300K |
Pilot hardware fleet Validators and kiosks, structured toward lease and cooperative-owned capex over time | $450K |
Entities, audit & controls Philippine and Australian structure with institution-grade financial controls | $500K |
Settlement working capital A float buffer, ring-fenced, never touched by operating spend | $400K |
Contingency Regulatory timelines slip. We plan for it instead of discovering it | $900K |
Buffer to the next raise Six months beyond milestone completion | $900K |
The milestones the money buys
CDA recognition, in writing
Written recognition or no-objection on the closed-loop cooperative-credit primitive. We name this plainly as the single binary risk in the thesis; everything after it is execution.
300,000 members across three or more kinds of cooperative
Savings and loans, shops, and transport all live at once. This is the milestone that proves Panta is cooperative infrastructure rather than a single-sector tool. Members under contract and transport passengers are counted separately, never blended.
Approximately USD 1M annual recurring revenue
Monthly membership fees where the member is the user, per-transaction charges where they are not, plus hardware and early lending fees.
An apex federation contract, signed and live
A federation-level commercial contract in operation. Not a letter of intent; letters of intent do not clear a credit committee.
A first credit product originating
Member advances live under the cooperative authority's rules and counsel's guidance, proving the highest-value revenue line is real rather than roadmap.
Net revenue retention above 100%
The first cohort of cooperatives spending more in year two than year one, because services compound on the same account.
Why 6 is the right number
A smaller round buys fourteen to sixteen months and forces a return to market mid-deployment with one cooperative type live, the weakest possible next-round story. A larger one prices proof we have not yet earned. Six million, staged against the two triggers above, carries the platform to the milestones that make the next conversation a normal one.
For scale, one illustration from the public record: the largest Philippine federation network counts 7.6 million individual members across more than a thousand cooperatives (September 2024). At a modest PHP 25 per member per month, a single relationship of that shape is roughly a USD 39 million annual revenue business, with no new market entry and no new licence. The four countries this platform was architected for hold a cooperative membership base in the hundreds of millions.
The briefing is a working demonstration.
One conversation: the thesis, the regulatory position, and the platform live, from a passenger's tap to the money settling to the cooperative to the regulator's own portal. Bring your hardest questions.