GoTo Aims for 15.2 Trillion Rupiah IPO’s Fund to Strengthen Its Hyperlocal Ecosystem

PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk (GoTo) officially announced an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX). In the public disclosure, Gojek and Tokopedia are aiming for $1.1 billion fresh funds or equivalent to 15.2 trillion Rupiah.

GoTo is to sell 48 billion shares with a maximum of 52 billion Series A shares, equivalent to 4.35% of the issued and paid-up capital. The price set in the range of Rp316-Rp346 per share.

Co-founder and CEO Andre Soelistyo at the public disclosure of PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk

At this price, his team estimates to reach a market capitalization of between IDR 376.6 trillion-IDR 413.7 trillion, and possibly become one of the IPOs with the largest value in Indonesia. In addition, this pricing is considered to reflect GoTo’s business strength, fundamentals, and prospects in the future.

The initial offering period is open from 15-21 March 2022 and the public offering period is around 29-31 March 2022. Meanwhile, the listing date is effective on 25 March 2022. Meanwhile, GoTo appoints underwriters for the issuance of securities, including PT Indo Premier Sekuritas, PT Mandiri Sekuritas, and PT Trimegah Sekuritas Indonesia Tbk.

Ride-hailing, e-commerce, and fintech

In its disclosure, GoTo’s Co-founder and CEO Andre Soelistyo said he would use GoTo’s IPO funds to build the right infrastructure and resources to execute hyperlocal strategies through its three subsidiaries, namely Gojek (ride-hailing), Tokopedia (e-commerce), and GoTo Financial (fintech). With this strategy, GoTo seeks to accelerate the growth of new users, user engagement, and penetration of newly launched products.

Based on the company data, Gojek currently has 2.5 million driver partners; Tokopedia has 12 million merchants with nearly 600 million SKUs for physical products, 4000 digital products, and more than 100 million Monthly Active Users (MAU); and GoTo Financial has licenses in e-wallet, P2P, multi-finance, banking (Jago), e-money, to payment gateways.

GoTo’s digital ecoosystem / Source: IndoPremier

“With a large ecosystem, this enables GoTo to execute a hyperlocal strategy. Efforts to meet the needs of goods and services at an economical cost can be achieved because supply and demand are close to each other. This is one of GoTo’s strengths by optimizing the network of driver partners, merchants, and logistics that are owned. This is a more sustainable strategy than depending on one use case,” he explained.

Citing the RedSeer report as of December 2021, the on-demand market is estimated to reach Rp. 980 trillion in 2025. Then, the fintech market is estimated to reach IDR 256.3 trillion in 2020 and is estimated to increase to IDR 1,009 trillion in 2025.

Euromonitor data in 2020 also notes that the giant GoTo ecosystem is able to contribute more than 2% of Indonesia’s GDP and serves almost two thirds of household consumption in Indonesia.

Road to profitability

Based on the initial IPO prospectus, GoTo’s total assets were recorded at Rp158.17 trillion as of the end of September 2021. At that current period, its revenue was recorded at Rp3.40 trillion, rise from the previous year at around Rp. 2.34 trillion. However, GoTo still posted a net loss of IDR 11.58 trillion, increase from the same period last year of IDR 10.43 trillion.

Within 12 months (October 2020-September 2021), GoTo’s Gross Transaction Value/GTV reached Rp414.2 trillion. A total of 55 million users made transactions with order values reaching 2 billion in that period.

GoTo’s financial performance / Source: IndoPremier

Regarding its profit target, Tokopedia’s Co-founder William Tanuwijaya said, “The aim to be profitable is not just wishful thinking. It is clear from our prospectus, there are improvements [performance] in every quarter. We show our track record of operations and believe we can profit in the medium term,” he said.

Meanwhile, Andre revealed that he had mapped out his strategy by highlighting several main keys, acceleration of post-merger services with Tokopedia, user acquisition costs, and the impact on margins.

He said that the synergy in the Gojek and Tokopedia ecosystems could help boost the growth in the number of users and transactions. Also, this is visible from the increase in user spending after the merger of the two business entities into GoTo.

“In one marketing activity, we can simultaneously increase transactions from our services. For example, transactions at Tokopedia using GoSend with GoPay payments. In one spending, three to four services are used,” he explained at the GoTo IPO press conference.

Moreover, Andre also highlighted the commission factor (take rate) on the GoTo platform which is considered lower than similar platforms in the world. With this synergy, the opportunity to increase the take rate can be faster along the development of innovation, increased penetration of users and services, to marketing activities. This way, gross income will also increase.

Meanwhile, in terms of user acquisition costs, the implementation of machine learning and data can help GoTo to understand user behavior. Therefore, his team can create campaigns and products that are more personalized to users. This will also reduce the cost of acquisition as the market becomes more targeted.

“With all of the above factors, this can have an impact on margin expansion and cost efficiency at fixed costs. Revenue growth is faster than outgoing costs. This can help us achieve profit,” he concluded.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

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AwanTunai Scores Series A3 Funding in the Form of Equity and Debt

AwanTunai fintech lending service has received another funding. Based on the data submitted to the regulator, the value is around $8.5 million or equivalent to 121.5 billion Rupiah. Several investors participated, including International Finance Corporation (IFC), Global Brain, Insignia Ventures, OCBC NISP Ventures, and others.

DailySocial.id confirmed with AwanTunai’s Co-Founder & CEO Dino Setiawan about the new funding, which was part of the Series A3. He also explained that the investment consisted of two types, equity funding and loan (debt facilities). The above value is equity funding, while the debt facility is yet to be disclosed.

In this round, IFC became the largest contributor around 50% of the total value of equity funding. The participation of a financial institution under the World Bank in AwanTunai’s funding round adds to the list of its portfolio in Indonesia. Previously, IFC also invested in PasarPolis, ASSA, and eFishery. Part of its mission is to seek impactful investment projects, such as to increase financial inclusion and digitalization in the real sector.

AwanTunai announced a series A2 funding of $56.2 million (over 811 billion Rupiah) in equity and loan facilities in mid-2021. Equity funding of $11.2 million was provided by new investors BRI Ventures and OCBC NISP Ventura, as well as participation from previous investors, including Insignia Ventures and Global Brains.

AwanTunai specializes in supply chain financing, targeting micro-enterprises in the regions. As of June 2021, the company has collaborated with more than 160 supplier partners to help traditional wholesalers digitize and finance their businesses. AwanTunai has served more than 8,000 micro merchants as users, with an increasing number of users coming from tier 2 and 3 cities in Indonesia.

Edtech Startup Dibimbing Seeks Fresh Funding Through FundEx SCF Platform

Edtech startups Dibimbing seeks fresh funding through stock securities issuance at FundEx, a securities crowdfunding startup. Dibimbing aiming for IDR 1.2 billion funding with 45 days offer period. There are 2.4 million total shares issued or the equivalent of 5% with a Rp500 price per share.

Dibimbing was founded in November 2020 by three young alumni of the University of Indonesia, Zaky Muhammad Syah, Alim Anggono, and Wildan Gunawan. The company focuses on helping users improve the abilities and skills required in the working industry. The educational programs provided are data science, digital marketing & UI/UX, business intelligent & SEO.

Indonesian digital industry’s rapid growth is faced with a major issue, the demand and availability of digital talent. World Bank’s data shows that Indonesia requires around nine million digital talents in 15 years or around 600 thousand people per year in average. If you rely only on the conventional education system, it will not meet the pace of the current industry.

As a solution to this gap, Dibimbing was developed as an edtech platform that provides digital skills learning, career preparation, and job distribution for Indonesian digital talents.

“Dibimbing has a vision to deliver unlimited digital talent as we want to help people find jobs easily and also provide them access to low-cost learning. Therefore, we need funding to scale up our product, and we need a partner to help spread the impactful work of Dibimbing for our customers,” Dibimbing’s CEO, Zaky Muhammad Syah said in an official statement.

The company’s business growth shows an upward trend. Its early days’ turnover rate was only IDR 2 million, then slowly increased to IDR 4.49 billion by the end of last year. The company has reached the BEP and make profit in the second quarter of 2021. There are 912 people who already graduated, mentored by 147 experts registeres in Dibimbing.

In the company’s prospectus, Dibimbing offers a number of benefits for its investors. In addition to capital gains, investors also get a special bonus in the form of a free investment class worth of IDR 1 million for each person.

Around 80% of the funds raised by Dibimbing will be used to improve the quality of technology-oriented products, including the use of AI to provide a better experience for its users. The remaining 20% will be used to recruit the best marketing team to acquire more users

Mitigation process with FundEx

Dibimbing is the second company to raise funds through a startup pioneered by Agung Wibowo. Dibimbing’s shares are available to purchase through FundEx starting from Rp500 thousand, it will be affordable for many people.

In a separate interview with DailySocial.id, Agung explained that the company held a quite strict mitigation process with Dibimbing’s funding, from the beginning of the registration/pre-funding process to funding. Also, FundEx has been socializing the decision to issue debt or stock-based securities.

“We socialized the differences and consequences of the two securities products on the SCF platform, therefore, prospective issuers can choose securities that suit the company’s needs and strategic plans.”

He further explained, in the initial phase, prospective publishers are required to carry out an e-KYC process to ensure that the company/prospective issuer is a legal entity,” he said. After e-KYC is complete, we move on to the next stage, the process of signing an agreement between the prospective issuer and FundEx, either electronically or manually.

The goal is to ensure that if there are further obstacles to various parties in the process of offering securities to potential investors is a legal and binding agreement. Furthermore, the due diligence. Prospective publishers will be analyzed in terms of their performance, business prospects, and business risk profile.

This stage is also carried out transparently and can be monitored with prospective publishers through the FundEx platform, e-mail, or other communication media. “Every prospective issuer that passes the due diligence test and launches its securities offering on FundEx, potential investors can get a prospectus and can start funding the issuance of these securities.”

Agung continued, “Prospective investors’ funds do not go directly to the prospective issuer’s account, but are kept in an escrow account. It will only be transferred to the checking account of the prospective issuer if the crowdfunding target for the securities issued has been met. And if the funding target is not achieved, the funds from potential investors will be returned, and the securities offering will be null and void.”

FundEx targets to provide alternative funding platforms for 30 companies by the end of this year. Meanwhile, conducting intensive education through various activities on various online and offline platforms. This step is important to align the public’s understanding of the investment variants with different levels of risk.

Based on data compiled by OJK as of December 2021, the total fundraising through the SCF platform reached Rp412 billion, an increase of 115.48% compared to the same period in the previous year of Rp191.2 billion. Likewise, the number of investors in 2020 was 22,341 people, an increase of 319.56% to 93,733 in 2021.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

Zenius Receives Follow on Funding from MDI Ventures

Zenius edtech startup today (7/3) announced follow on funding from MDI Ventures with an undisclosed amount. In total, Zenius is said to have raised over $40 million (more than 576 billion Rupiah) from its investors. Past investors (Northstar Group, Alpha JWC Ventures, Openspace Ventures) and new investor (Beacon Venture Capital as a venture capital company owned by Kasikorn Bank Thailand) also joined the round.

It is not clear whether this fresh money will classified into a new round or continue the Pre-Series B round last year.

In an official statement, Zenius’ CEO, Rohan Monga said this funding will support the company’s further development and expansion of the learning ecosystem Zenius will be focused on improving personalized learning experiences by increasing students’ learning motivation.

“Through our latest acquisition network, Primagama, we will expand reach to increase the impact we have in education. We strongly believe that a hybrid learning model, which is a combination of offline and online, will provide the best results for students,” Monga said.

He said, backed by strategic investors such as MDI Ventures, the company is capable to expand its network of partnerships and service distribution to have a bigger and deeper impact on Indonesian education.

“Zenius has a proven track record of making an educational impact in Indonesia. Was founded in 2004, Zenius has now developed a comprehensive learning ecosystem,” MDI Ventures’ CEO, Donald Wihardja said.

Since 2004, Zenius has helped more than 1.5 million alumni to get into their state/dream university. Last year, seven out of 10 Zenius’ premium users passed the Computer-Based Written Examination (UTBK), while Zenius’ income increased fourfold, one of which was due to “Live Class” feature.

Following the Primagama acquisition, Zenius completed its learning ecosystem by collaborating with Disney for the elementary school segment, as well as developing ZenPro, a platform for the professional or lifelong learning segment.

“Zenius is a collaborative player. We are confident to realize our mission in creating a smarter, brighter, and cooler Indonesia’s young generation through collaboration, partnership, and synergy with various stakeholders, such as MDI, with the same vision, advancing education in Indonesia,” Rohan said.

Market competition and value proposition

Indonesia’s edtech sector is rapidly growing, especially since the pandemic. There are two players currently dominating the market, Ruangguru and Zenius, with nearly similar sub-product variants.

Zenius always highlight one thing, it is on the material side. Instead of inviting students to just memorize, Zenius emphasized on understanding fundamental concepts and critical thinking through various case studies.

Apart from Zenius and Ruangguru, several edtech platforms also creating maneuvers. Most recently, CoLearn has just secured 244 billion Series A funding. The app focuses on math and science subjects, helping students solve their homework independently. Also, there are Pahamify, Squline, and others.

Primagama’s presence in Zenius’ line of business has the potential to strengthen its value proposition if it truly succeeds in wrapping up a hybrid learning experience – this could also be the first in Indonesia.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

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Blocknom Crypto Asset “Earning” Platform Snags 7 Billion Seed Funding

Crypto asset earning platform Blocknom announced a seed funding of $500 thousand (over 7 billion Rupiah) from three investors, including YCombinator, Number Capital, and Magic Fund. The last two names is fronted by Hendra Kwik (Fazz) and he is appointed as an advisor at Blocknom along with Tianwei Liu (Fazz) and Thomas Chen (Magic Fund).

Blocknom is currently participating in the Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch along with several startups. The startup was initiated in January 2022 by Gojek and Shopee’s former employee, Fransiskus Raymond and Ritase’s former engineer, Ghuniyu Fattah Rozaq.

In terms of value proposition, Blocknom offers yields deposit on available stablecoin-based crypto assets, includng USDT (Tether), USDC (Circle), and XIDR (StraitsX). The product does not have a lockup period, therefore, investors can withdraw their funds at any time. Blocknom offers earnings of up to 13% per year and is claimed to be safe from the price volatility.

“We started Blocknom to provide easy crypto investing for everyone. Based on our research, 90% of people gain negative results from trading crypto. However, they find it better to make long term crypto investments. We have not been able to find a suitable product in the market. Therefore, we decided to build Blocknom for the good of everyone,” Blocknom’s Co-founder and CEO, Fransiskus Raymond said in an official statement, Friday (4/3).

Blocknom

Based on the company’s blog, Blocknom is the first gateway for investors to enter the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) era. This platform operates on the web2 internet base and serves as a bridge for investors to the web3 DeFi industry. Blocknom implements transparency in the fund management process and has a proof of community system, with a commitment to always involve the community in the DeFi selection process to manage investor funds and has an unlimited incentives program for the community.

In the earning process, investors make earning deposits on the Blocknom website or application and they will start getting daily rewards.

Behind the scenes, investors’ funds will be automatically input into various staking and earning platforms that have been pre-selected by the Blocknom community such as, A.A.V.E, BALANCER, CELCIUS NETWORKS, CURVE, and so on. The Blocknom algorithm will automatically carry out the process of selecting and distributing funds to the DeFi platform with the largest yield.

The competitive interest will be given as the lending institution relies on blockchain technology, with collateral lending as the core business. The collateral will be in the form of digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. This allows borrowers to pay a premium interest, as they believe the value of the asset will be much higher than the interest they are paying.

Blocknom trusts Fireblock as a custodial company to store all Blocknom deposit funds. For additional security, they implement the highest level of wallet security (bank standards) and full encryption (2 factor verification). In terms of regulatory, Blocknom operates throughout Southeast Asia using the license partner method from StraitsX, licensed by MAS. Also, they currently submitting for a permit to operate in Indonesia to CoFTRA as the relevant authority.

Fransiskus said, after earning stablecoins, the company will continue to innovate to realize the mission of crypto investment for everyone journey through Blocknom.

“In the future, there will be more features designed to help people feel the benefits of crypto, not only as an investment, but also part of their daily life,” he said.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

Go-Ventures Leads 86 Billion Rupiah Pre Series A Funding for Agritech Startup AgriAku

Agritech startup focused on supply chain solutions, AgriAku, announced a Pre-Series A funding of $6 million or more than 86 billion Rupiah led by Go-Ventures. The previous investor, MDI Arise also participated, followed by MDI Centauri, Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund, and several business angels.

The company plans to use this fresh fund on three purposes; Hiring more talents in the operations, supply chain, product and technology areas; Strengthen the penetration of agri-supply B2B marketplaces across the country; and Growing innovation and capability of the product ecosystem to improve the agricultural value chain in Indonesia.

Indonesia’s agricultural industry is considered to have a significant contribution to the economy, around 13.5% of GDP. However, the upstream agricultural market is highly fragmented with unorganized value chains for agricultural supplies such as seeds, fertilizers and chemicals. Farmers, suppliers and retailers are facing the same problems – supply and price instability, inefficient manual workflows, and limited access to formal finance.

“AgriAku’s B2B input market platform is ideally positioned to increase price transparency and market access for all stakeholders in the agricultural input sector. Over time, we hope that AgriAku can significantly increase farmer productivity and improve farmers’ standard of living,” Go-Ventures’ Partner , Aditya Kamath said.

AgriAku, founded by Irvan Kolonas and Danny Handoko in 2021, holds a mission to create a transparent network between all stakeholders in the agricultural product supply chain system. They’re using an approach that builds a market called “Toko Tani”, directlu connected with first-tier producers or distributors. This method is claimed to allow farmers have a complete catalog of agricultural products at a much more affordable price.

In late February 2022, the company officially introduced an update for the AgriAku untuk Mitra app on the Google Play Store. This platform provides the most complete range of agricultural products compared to the common farmer shops, ranging from seeds, medicines and nutrients, fertilizers and agricultural tools. With Agriaku’s reporting and cash register system, agents can also make accurate digital records to simplify work and accelerate business development.

Agri Aku is not the first agritech funded by the Gojek’s investment arm. Previously, Go-Ventures also led the follow-on funding of Segari online grocery and several startups with similar business models, including eFishery (Fresh), FoodMarketHub, and KitaBeli. This strategic action has proven Gojek’s mission to strengthen the online grocery line.

Indonesia’s agritech startups

For hundreds of years, Indonesia has been known as an agricultural region and has exported many commodities and foodstuffs around the world. However, the agricultural industry is still considered not to provide a fair opportunity for farmers to improve their quality of life and business to date. As the world’s population increases to 8 billion, with Indonesia contributing around 280 million, the role of the agricultural sector will be even greater to meet the growing human needs.

In a publication entitled “Yielding Next Gen. Agri Conglomerate Leveraging Tech Orchestration”, Arise highlighted four main pain points in the agricultural value chain. These are limited access to capital, fragmented and inefficient supply chains, lack of access to technology, and price uncertainty due to climate change.

While this sector held enormous potential, its value could exceed $500 billion of global GDP by 2030. Asia Pacific alone is projected to contribute 8.2% of the total value. On this trend, investment for Argitech continues to increase from year to year worldwide. In 2020, there were approximately 834 funding deals, accounting for more than $6.7 billion.

Some of the agritech players are getting more popular in this country and getting listed as a soonicorn, including Tanihub, Eden Farm, Aruna, and eFishery. The newcomer, Semaai has also secured fresh funding from Surge and Beenext.

Ekosistem solusi digital untuk sektor pertanian / Arise

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

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Behind the Rumors around “Chilibeli” Social Commerce

Social commerce startup Chilibeli is temporarily closing its operations, at least until the end of this month. Public’s been told that the reason is server relocation and deep cleaning of resources. The employees are getting laid off and promised that this month’s salary will be disbursed soon.

The management is said to have conveyed the employees that they had tried their best to save the company. According to reliable sources, Chilibeli is still having difficulty on securing the Series B fundraising since last year.

The company is reportedly considering to sell the business. Two unicorn startups are said to have explored potential acquisitions, however, the strongest candidate is rising. WeBuy, a similar startup from Singapore, is highly rumored to be taking over Chilibeli’s business.

WeBuy has been available in Indonesia since September 2021. This company is a portfolio of MDI Ventures, Wavemaker, KB Financial Group, and Rocket Internet.

We haven’t received a confirmation from Chilibeli’s management and its investors regarding this matter.

Chilibeli was founded by Alex Feng, Damon Yue, and Matt Li in 2019. They announced a Series A funding round of $10 million in March 2020. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia Surge, Kinesys Group, and Alto Partners.

The company relies on the C2M (customer to manufacturer) business concept in bridging fresh products from farmers to final consumers in a number of communities. The concept exists to encourage logistics efficiency and ensure product freshness to reach consumers’ hands.

Chilibeli was participated in Surge’s Accelerator Program batch 2.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

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NOBI Announces Seed Funding of 57 Billion Rupiah Led by AC Ventures

Crypto asset management platform, NOBI (PT Encryption Technology Handal) announced seed funding of $4 million or IDR 57.1 billion. This round was led by AC Ventures, with the participation of Appworks, Skystar Capital Cakra Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and a number of angel investors.

Fresh funds will be focused on developing products, increasing the penetration and utilization of Honest Token (HNST), and strengthening the team. As is well known, NOBI aims to help investors diversify assets into cryptocurrencies and help people with limited time to manage assets with easy access.

Reached 1 trillion Rupiah crypto transactions

The startup was founded by Lawrence Samantha (CEO), Edy Senjaya (CTO), and Dionisius Evan Alam (CPO). NOBI’s main services consist of Staking, Savings and Trading Strategy, enabling users to enjoy attractive returns from Bitcoin, Ethereum and other leading crypto assets.

“This is an important milestone for us. AC Ventures and our other investors provide an unrivaled immersive experience in fintech, investing and crypto. This investment round demonstrates their trust and commitment to what we can do to make a difference to unify the crypto space and finances,” Lawrence said.

Since 2018, NOBI has managed over 1 trillion Rupiah worth of crypto assets. All independent services are claimed to grow by 15x along with a significant increase in users in the last 6 months.

“In line with the current global trends, the demand for crypto assets in Indonesia is growing rapidly. Domestic trading volume has increased by more than 10x to exceed $60 billion by 2021 through more than 11 million user accounts. NOBI provides investors with various services that allow your users to earn interest. The user-friendly and intuitive NOBI platform makes it easy to start investing in cryptocurrencies,” AC Ventures’ Founder & Managing Partner, Michael Soerijadji said.

Crypto enthusiasts are rising

According to BAPPEPTI, in its role as Indonesia’s regulator that handles crypto assets, the number of crypto investors in the country is growing 2x faster than other instruments such as stocks in 2021, reaching 11.2 million. This is impressive, as this growth occurred amidst the highly fluctuative price of crypto.

Throughout 2021, the value of crypto asset transactions in Indonesia has reached $61.4 billion or more than 859 trillion Rupiah, an increase of more than 1222% compared to the previous year.

The rapid adoption of crypto exists amidst the growing trend of wealthtech platforms. This is supposed to increase financial inclusion and literacy, encouraging people to start realizing the essential of investing.

Even though the number is quite small, some local platforms are developing applications to facilitate people to invest in crypto, for example INDODAX, Tokocrypto, Pintu, and Pluang. It is even more intriguing as the trend of other blockchain products is starting to rise, along with the growing interest in Indonesia, NFT for example, it runs on top of the blockchain technology and involves crypto assets for its transactions.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

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Brick Announces 122 Billion Rupiah Funding Led by Flourish Ventures and Antler

Open finance startup Brick announced seed funding of $8.5 million or around 122 billion Rupiah, led by Flourish Ventures and Antler. This fundraising aims to support the vision of empowering the next generation of fintech companies with an easy-to-implement, cost-effective and inclusive infrastructure. This includes regional expansion plans to Singapore and the Philippines, after its first focusing on Indonesia.

Other investors are participated in this round, including Trihill Capital, and the previous investors, Better Tomorrow Ventures and Rally Cap Ventures. There are also some well-known fintech operators, including Sima Gandhi (Plaid, Creative Juice), Yan Wu (Bond), Brian Ma (Divvy Homes) , Ooi Hsu Ken (Iterative), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs) and Andrea Baronchelli (Aspire).

Brick was founded in 2020 by Gavin Tan (CEO) and Deepak Malhotra (CTO). Gavin was an early employee at Aspire. Deepak built India’s first unicorn neobank for millennials as the co-founder and CTO of Slice.

In an official statement, Gavin said, Brick is building a fintech rail for Southeast Asian technology companies. This funding will enable Brick to accelerate growth, scale technology platforms to expand product offerings, and support more developers in the region to build financially inclusive services.

“This funding also allows us to recruit senior local talent in every country where we operate such as Indonesia, to localize our product and ensure that it is in line with best practices and the highest standards of good corporate governance and consumer protection, especially in the sphere of integrity and data protection. Compliance, consumer protection and consumer trust are our top priorities at Brick,” Tan said.

Global Investments Advisors of Flourish Ventures, Smita Aggarwal said, “Brick is ideally positioned for growth, with a great team and a leading competitive position in the market with strong regulatory support for open finance. He continued, to catalyze the growth of financial services across customer segments, Southeast Asia needs infrastructure that enables secure and fast integration of identity verification, credit assurance and financial planning for customers.

“We believe that widespread adoption of open financial tools can accelerate financial inclusion across the region and provide a significant boost to economic growth. We look forward to working with Brick as it supports the revival of embedded finance in this very unbanked region,” Aggarwal said.

Antler’s Partner, Teddy Himler added, “We believe in an open financial model and vision for Southeast Asia. With Brick, Antler believes the region will have a more transparent, competitive and innovative fintech ecosystem. While Europe is taking a regulation-driven approach, he felt the market attraction from fintech apps (and their customers) to build on top of a basic API infrastructure.

“We believe that ASEAN’s most innovative banks, governments and consumer services will embrace open finance as a way to leapfrog traditional payments and data infrastructure,” Himler said.

In addition to Brick, open finance startups that have operations in Indonesia include Finantier, Brankas, and Ayoconnect.

Brick API Solution

Brick builds Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for fintech and consumer technology companies. This API makes it easy for popular fintech platforms to offer payment, credit, investment, and insurance products to their consumers by linking these platforms to hyperlocal data sources. For example, if a user wants to take out a loan, Brick technology can immediately link the platform with the user’s financial account, or collect mobile wallet or job data to help process loan applications.

This technology automates and integrates the time-consuming process of collecting data from multiple sources to facilitate financial transactions. That means fintech platforms can quickly offer their users a variety of customized financial products and improve access to finance while accelerating digital adoption across Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Brick now serves more than 50 paying clients, including some of Indonesia’s fastest growing fintech and conglomerates such as Sinarmas Group and Astra Financial. The company supports more than 13 million API calls and nearly 1 million consumers every month.

Over the past six months, Brick has expanded its API suite to better serve technology companies in Indonesia. In addition to the Brick Data API, the company now offers Brick Verification and Brick Payments. This allows the Brick API suite to cover deeper use cases and allows developers to launch world-class products with a single API integration.

For example, the end-to-end user journey from onboarding, underwriting and disbursing for users looking to take out loans, can now be automated with Brick Verification, Brick Data, and Brick Payments. While the company is currently focused on Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, Brick plans to cover the entire region, starting with expansion to Singapore and the Philippines later this year.

Brick serves a dynamic and rapidly growing technology ecosystem in Indonesia, with more than 5,000 technology companies increasingly leveraging fintech in their product offerings. Indonesian fintech companies managed to attract more than $1 billion in investment throughout 2021, up from $282 million in 2020.

The high demand was accompanied by strong regulatory support. Bank account penetration in Indonesia is still below 50% and, to meet the government’s target of 90% financial inclusion by 2024, the central bank issued a comprehensive open banking API standard in 2020. Brick is collaborating with Bank Indonesia and the Indonesian Financial Services Authority ( OJK).

Research shows that open banking can have a strong economic impact in emerging markets, where it can significantly increase financial inclusion. Research conducted by Flourish Ventures and McKinsey & Company shows that widespread adoption of an open data ecosystem in India could result in a four to five percent increase in GDP by 2030.

Flourish believes that the potential for improvement in Southeast Asia could be even greater since the region ranks ahead of India in terms of digital adoption but lags behind in access to traditional bank-provided financial services.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian

Ralali Confirms Series D Funding of 155 Billion Rupiah Led by SBI Group and Bee Accelerate

The B2B marketplace startup, Ralali, confirmed the Series D funding of $10.9 million (over 155 billion Rupiah) led by the previous leading investor in its Series B round, SBI Group, and Bee Accelerate. This round also participated by other investors, such as Beenos Asia, ICMG Partners, and Arbor Venture.

With the additional funds, Ralali has managed to raise a total $33.4 million (more than 476 billion Rupiah) since its establishment. The company announced the series C round in July 2019 worth of $13 million. The leading investors in this round including Arbor Ventures, TNB Aura, and ZIGExN Co., Ltd. founder, Jo Hirao.

Ralali’s Founder and CEO Ralali Joseph confirmed the news to DailySocial. “This [funding] has been finalized a few months ago,” he said.

Ralali’s nine years operation

Ralali started its business as a B2B marketplace in 2013 and is now engaging in various lines outside the marketplace to become a group. Ralali Group aims to be a one stop solution for business ecosystem. Moreover, the company focused on providing for the business players, therefore, all channels are focused on user suppliers and business players.

Along with the growing market demand and business opportunities, Ralali Group develops business solutions to help business people build reputations and develop networks in the digital era. Today’s marketplace platform is equipped with various business solutions, from financial (paylater), logistics, MSME support, and enablers, the result of partner collaborations.

Ralali Connect is one of them, a platform aimed to provide MSME players with digital storefront and to connect with various communities with related business interests. There is also Ralali Agent as an on-demand business platform, a solution to find additional income for the community in order to help businesses grow by providing collaboration between digital technology and the workforce in conducting O2O (offline-to-online) processes.

Next, the Ralali Solution Center as a forum for business players still doing the offline appproach to join as a Ralali.com seller, therefore, they can market the products online. Ralali Solution Center is a bridge between sellers and corporations or clients of Ralali.com. Clients or buyers can make purchases via RFQ (Request For Quotation), one of the superior features of Ralali.com.

The next newly released innovation is the Ralali Business Collection to create opportunities for people who are planning to start a business, offering business packages and wholesale prices. This opportunity is open for all kinds of businesses, including coffee, basic necessities, contemporary drinks, and automotive.

Apart from that, the company has penetrated the health segment by producing Primero masks and presenting a tech-based clinic called Neoclinic. It provides antigen swab services, rapid tests, drive thru or home services, and releases vitamin products. The company has also entered the Indonesian porang (konyaku) processing industry with FITMEE, a low-calorie healthy instant noodle. Ralali acquired FITMEE from The Fit Company and already make an announcement on the company website.

In the latest data, Ralali.com is said to have more than 1.3 million registered users, more than 20,000 vendors, 360 thousand products, and more than 6 million monthly visits from all over Indonesia.

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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian