East Ventures’ Position Within the Indonesian VC Landscape
29 April 2019
Co-founded in 2009, East Ventures has established itself as a pivotal investor for early-stage startups in Southeast Asia and Japan landscape since its inception. Our presence has reached numerous countries with healthy startup ecosystems such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Our main focus, however, is in Indonesia, and our large portfolio in the country is a testament to that fact.
Known as the most active seed investors in both Southeast Asia and the world (according to Crunchbase), we have invested in more than 300 portfolio companies globally and backed several big-name startups since their early days. These include Tokopedia, Traveloka, Disdus (acquired by Groupon), Mercari, Kudo (acquired by Grab), Omise, Tech in Asia, IDN Media (previously IDNTimes), Jurnal, Ruangguru, Cermati, Shopback, Mokapos, CoHive (previously EV Hive), and Loket. Several of these have gone on to become ‘unicorn’ startups, with valuations of US$1 billion or more.
Last year, East Ventures invested in several new potential Indonesian startups and here is the list of our investments in the archipelago
Warung Pintar
Warung Pintar is a micro retail technology company that wants to enable digitalization within society via its grassroots communities. Using data processing and analysis, Warung Pintar enables data points for the underserved bottom of the pyramid which forms the bulk of the population in Indonesia, opening new windows of opportunity for financial inclusion, social security, behavior analysis, community engagement, and impact monitoring.
To date, the company has helped more than 2,000 warungs in Greater Jakarta and Banyuwangi.
Fore Coffee
Fore Coffee is an on-demand specialty coffee company that aims to change the way Indonesians consume coffee via technology. It sources, roasts, and develops its own espresso blend using only 100% Arabica beans; each cup is brewed with freshly roasted beans, producing high quality coffee.
Fore Coffee was incubated by East Ventures before being launched to the public. It was funded for the first time in the third quarter of last year, and already has 37 outlets until today.
Moka
Moka is a technology company based in Jakarta, Indonesia. It provides cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) and payment solutions that empower small and medium-sized businesses to sell and grow better.
Founded in 2014, the company is currently present across 100+ cities in Indonesia with over 15,000 merchants.
Interesting fact: Moka is one of the startups that has the distinction of receiving its investment from East Ventures over a phone call, and is proof that a good deal can and should be executed fast.
CoHive
CoHive is the largest and fastest growing coworking space in Indonesia. Research from Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) Indonesia showed that CoHive has dominated coworking place market in Indonesia, with 26% business growth.
Right now, it has 30 locations, including an 18-story building called CoHive 101. In Q1 2019, it increased its spaces’ area by 20%, with regional expansion to Bali and Jogja. Until September 2019, it will continue the expansion to 9 new locations in Central Jakarta, West Jakarta, and Depok. It also targets another city, such as Pontianak, Semarang, and Makassar.
It is started with our initiative in June 2015 to built a place for our founders to gather and community event. Not long after that, we realized that this initiative actually similar to a business model called co-working space. We decided to continue the project and received extraordinary responses.
Waresix
Waresix is an end-to-end logistics technology startup with major ambitions to improve the supply chain in Indonesia, providing logistics solutions for individuals and businesses looking to tap into the consumer market in a more efficient manner. Founded by engineers Andree Susanto, Edwin, and Filbert Hansel in 2017, Waresix uses multimodal transport and is the only player in the industry to provide an end-to-end freight solution to address the unruly landscape of Indonesia’s archipelago.
As of today, Waresix has partnered with 200 warehouse operators in major cities and remote areas across Indonesia. It handles general cargo, retail fulfillment, cold storage, transportation, and cross-border warehousing for overseas clients, in addition to providing support to SMEs that want to enter the e-commerce market.
Sirclo
Sirclo is Indonesia’s leading e-commerce technology company, empowering businesses to sell online. It currently has two main products: an ecommerce solution called Sirclo Store, which allows SMEs to sell products through their own website; and an end-to-end ecommerce enabler service called Sirclo Commerce.
Today, Sirclo has 240 full-time employees working across four offices in Greater Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, and Yogyakarta. The company’s revenue is still growing strong, and went up by 4x in 2018.
Cicil
Co-founded by Leslie Lim and Edward Widjonarko in 2016, Cicil addresses the credit needs of university students in Indonesia.
The two co-founders recognized that while access to education could lift and improve living standards, the education system in Indonesia was too costly for most. Cicil addresses this gap by providing financing to students for their tuition as well as necessary tools such as laptops and computers. This helps students grow and move forward, and solves one of the most critical Indonesian issues – human capacity development.
Since its inception in late 2016, the startup has expanded across ten provinces and 29 cities in Indonesia, and serves students from more than 100 universities.
Katadata
Katadata is an Indonesian company that specializes in data analysis and business publications. Supported by experienced journalists and reliable analysts in the business and financial fields, Katadata is characterized by the strength and sharpness of its analyses. By combining these two forces, the company provides a wealth of credible information and data about the economy, business, and finance to its users. It’s an indispensable reference source for business people, policy makers, and the media.
In August 2018, it received funding led by East Ventures.
Julo
Julo is a digital lending company that is revolutionizing access to financial products for millions of emerging consumers in Indonesia. It has developed the first digital data-driven credit underwriting and risk assessment platform, processing consumer loan applications and determining their creditworthiness via its mobile app.
Nodeflux
Nodeflux is a technology startup company from Jakarta, Indonesia that provides computer vision with deep learning, using it to solve many challenging problems by extending vision through Artificial Intelligence. Its Nodeflux Intelligent Video Analytics product can be deployed into any kind of source: CCTVs, webcams, phones, cameras, and more.
Its users can apply different kinds of logic rules to its product, and even customize these rules specifically for a particular client’s business needs or processes. Nodeflux’s products and services cover a wide range of sectors, including but not limited to smart city, defense and security, traffic management, toll management, store analytics (wholesale and retail), asset and facilities management, advertising, and transportation.
Member
Member is redefining loyalty programs. It helps clients to design, build, and manage long term, profitable loyalty solutions. Its mission is to change the loyalty landscape in Indonesia by offering capabilities ranging from loyalty program strategy development, design, management, and data analytics, to points issuance and trade.
Member also has Edy Sulistiyo, CEO of Loket.com (a portfolio company of East Ventures that was acquired by GO-JEK), as an advisor.
Nalagenetics
Nalagenetics was built with the aim of making personalized prescriptions accessible to as many people as possible. It thinks that pharmacogenomics, which is the study of the relationship of genomics and drug metabolism, has not been adopted in the region because of low cost efficiency. Compared to the status quo, current interventions are too expensive for an effect that is not well measured.
To address this problem, Nalagenetics builds platforms to better understand the safety and efficacy of prescriptions in Asia. It has three main products; genetic testing, clinical decision support tool, and patient engagement tool.
Bahasa.ai
Bahasa.ai is an enterprise AI-as-a-Service company whose mission is to build robust Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) modules for Bahasa Indonesia. Since its founding, it has served enterprise clients across industries such as finance, FMCG, telecommunication, and technology.
Moladin
Moladin aims to make life easier for motorcycle users in Indonesia by collating fragmented information across the motorcycle industry into a single platform, bringing the traditionally offline industry to the online world. The team and its founders are extremely passionate about connecting people and companies in the industry with each other, as well as building an ecosystem which serves the needs of motorcycle users in the country.
Montir
Montir is an internet company that provides an on-demand platform for automotive care. Customers can order car services, repairs and detailing, and even get their cars delivered to their homes. As a dedicated and passionate auto-tech company, it strives to be the number one auto-service platform in Indonesia by providing solutions for all automotive needs.