- BukuWarung raised funds from high profile investors & angels in the US and Asia as part of their YC Demo Day
- BukuWarung launches digital payments, seeing several millions USD in annualised TPV, ahead of plans to introduce monetisation products such as credit, savings, and insurance
- BukuWarung appoints strong leadership team with experience from PayTM, Ovo, Grab, Gojek, Oy, Sampoerna
JAKARTA, 29 September 2020 – BukuWarung, the FinTech company helping Indonesian micro-businesses manage their cash and credit transactions, today announced that it has raised funds from leading investors after graduating from Y-Combinator. Investors in this round include Partners of DST Global, GMO Venture Partners, Soma Capital, HOF Capital, VentureSouq and a clutch of high-profile angels including William Hockey (Plaid), Justin Mateen (Tinder), Rahul Vohra (Superhuman), Scott Belsky (CPO Adobe), Josh Buckley, Manik Gupta (ex-CPO Uber), Sriram Krishnan (Spotify), Harry Stebbings (20VC), Nancy Xiao (Bond Capital), Alison Barr Allen (Fast), along with angels from WhatsApp, Square and Airbnb
BukuWarung has successfully raised over 8-figure US dollars in funding, spread over three rounds in 2020. Current investors in the company include Quona Capital, East Ventures, AC Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners, Michael Sampoerna. The company is also backed by angel investors from companies such as Grab, Gojek, Flipkart, PayPal, Xendit and Mastercard. Having just launched digital payments in August, BukuWarung aims to significantly grow its user-base across Indonesia and to expand beyond its core bookkeeping features to monetizable products, such as credit, savings, and insurance.
“BukuWarung team is well suited to build the digital fintech infrastructure for Indonesian micro-businesses. I am excited by the team the company has put together and believe that the team has the right experience to propel the business forward while empowering millions of micro-businesses,” said William Hockey, Co-Founder of Plaid
Founded in 2019, BukuWarung is addressing the financial services gap plaguing Indonesia’s 60 million micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). Despite contributing around 60 percent towards Indonesia’s US$1 trillion GDP – these enterprises have been left behind in the digital transformation of the nation’s business ecosystem. A key operational challenge for the micro-businesses is their reliance on manual processes to do their accounting and repayments with customers, as BukuWarung estimates that less than 10% of the micro-businesses use any kind of digital tools to manage their business.
The company’s technology helps to accelerate and improve the bookkeeping process by tracking all transactions including credit, expense, and sales, and helps merchants with cash flow visibility through business reports. Through BukuWarung, merchants receive 3x faster repayments and see increased cash flow due to the automatic payment reminders sent by the app. To date, BukuWarung has served more than 1.2 million merchants across 750 locations in Indonesia. Via its app, the company also recorded several billion US dollars in gross transactional value, which grew by 100x in 2020 – making BukuWarung Indonesia’s largest and fastest-growing accounting platform.
“Our hypergrowth has been driven by a product-led and capital-efficient strategy. We’ve kept our product as simple, fast and native as WhatsApp, which is used by almost all MSMEs in Indonesia. This focus has resulted in great retention & engagement among underserved merchants who’re coming online as a business for the first time. We enhanced our bookkeeping feature to go beyond credit management; we added more granularity by introducing expense, sales, profit tracking, bluetooth printing, inventory management, business cards, and other features to help MSMEs understand and operate their business better,” said Chinmay Chauhan, Co-Founder of BukuWarung.
With this fresh round of funding, BukuWarung seeks to expand its technology team and build a range of financial services on its app, by integrating monetization products such as payments, credit and savings. As part of this strategy, BukuWarung launched a digital payment feature, in partnership with major Indonesian banks and e-wallet services such as OVO and DANA. It is the first company of its kind in Indonesia to provide this feature.
Within a month of launching digital payments, BukuWarung is already seeing several million USD of TPV (total payment volume) on an annualised basis and growth of 50x. Digital payments was introduced in response to evolving demands from its merchants for a safer and more efficient way to send and receive money, especially due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“We launched successful pilots for savings and working capital loans for our merchants and the early results are very promising in our path to monetisation. Launching digital payments is a crucial first step to realizing our mission to build the digital infrastructure for micro-businesses in Indonesia, especially since most of the 600Bn that flows through the ecosystem is still in cash. We are also going deeper in the payment solutions that we offer to provide our merchants with a more holistic solution for their cash and credit management needs across the value chain,” said Abhinay Peddisetty, Co-Founder of BukuWarung.
Steered by a team of FinTech and merchant network veterans
BukuWarung was founded by Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, who previously led Product & Revenue at Carousell and were Product Leaders at Grab & Kudo. While the idea behind BukuWarung came from experiencing the unmet financial needs of micro-businesses first hand, the founders were also inspired by their personal journeys as they both come from families who ran small neighborhood stores and were fully aware of the operational challenges small businesses face.
To better meet the bookkeeping and financial services needs of more MSMEs across Indonesia, BukuWarung’s founders have assembled a strong leadership team that includes talents with robust and extensive experiences in the FinTech and merchant ecosystems:
Mario Nicolas, Head of Growth. Mario possesses over a decade’s experience in product-driven growth, fintech and localization for tech companies such as Oy!, Grab and Kakao.
Abhay Jindal, Head of Engineering. Abhay possesses strong backend platform experience in technology firms from his time at e-commerce payment provider PayTM. Before that, he worked at logistics technology firm Rivigo and global internet company Amazon.
Alka Gupta, Head of Analytics. Aika has a strong background in Indonesia’s FinTech ecosystem, having worked in strategy roles for companies such as regional super-app Grab & Indonesia’s major wallet Ovo. In her new role, she will help BukuWarung collect data on merchants, as well as building insights to improve and build new products
Adi Harlim, Head of Partnerships. Before joining BukuWarung, Adi worked with the Sampoerna Group, where he primarily focused on the company’s retail operations like SRC. From his experience, Adi has built a large merchant network which helped him attune to the evolving needs of Indonesia’s grassroots businesses.
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About BukuWarung
BukuWarung is a Y-Combinator backed technology company that is building digital infrastructure for 60 million micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia. BukuWarung’s vision is to empower 60 million MSMEs in Indonesia to become financially aware and enable them to manage and grow their business using our technology platform, starting with bookkeeping and digital payments.
BukuWarung is backed by top tier VCs in Southeast Asia and globally: Y-Combinator, Quona Capital, East Ventures, AC Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners, and strategic angel investors.
For more information, visit: www.bukuwarung.com
