Indonesia based fintech BukuWarung, has closed a $60 million Series A round four months after its previous one. The round was led by debutant Valar Ventures (the firm's first investment in Indonesia) and Goodwater Capital.
Other participants included returning backers and angel investors like Aldi Haryopratomo, former chief executive officer of payment gateway GoPay, Klarna co-founder Victor Jacobsson, and SoftBank and Trihill Capital partners.
The startup claims this is the largest Series A round ever raised by a startup focused on services for MSMEs. However, when quizzed on the company's valuation, the startup declined to comment. The latest seed round implies that the Jakarta based startup has amassed $8o million in investment since it was launched in 2019. An interesting revelation about those investments is that more than 90% of the funds raised have not been spent.
BukuWarung's started as a digital bookkeeping app for MSMEs before expanding into financial services and e-commerce tools. The company offer services, including digital payments, inventory management, bulk transactions and a Shopify-like e-commerce platform called Tokoko.
The company claims that more than 6.5 million merchants in 750 Indonesian cities have registered on its platforms. It claims to have processed over $1.4 billion in annualized payments since its inception and is looking at hitting $10 billion in annualized payments by 2022.
BukuWarung is not the only firm in this space, and it has a competitor in the form of Bukukas, who raised a $50 million Series B last month.
"We don't see this space as a winner takes all. Our focus is on building the best products for MSMEs, as proven by our execution on our payments and accounting, shown by massive growth in payments TPV as we're 10x bigger than the nearest player in this space. We have already run successful lending experiments with partners in fintech and banks and are on track to monetize our merchants backed by our deep payments, accounting and other data that we collect." CEO Abhinay Peddisetty of BukuWarung on the difference between Bukukas.
BukuWarung plans to utilize the latest funding to expand its workforce to 300 from 150 and develop its accounting, digital payments and commerce products, including a payments infrastructure that will include QR payments and other services.
Indonesia in focus
GDP: $1.119 trillion compared to Singapore's 372.063 in 2019
Population: 270,625,568 compared to Singapore's 5,703,569 in 2019
GDP per capita: $4,135 compared to Singapore's $65,233 in 2019
