Bukalapak in August became Indonesia's first ever locally listed tech unicorn. Its robust revenue growth in its first reported quarter as a public company offers a compelling alternative narrative to characterizations of destructive hyper-competition across the country's e-commerce industry. Company President Teddy Oetomo points out that tier 2-4 cities, where its "Mitra Bukalapak" service dominates by serving micro and small-sized offline merchants, is actually where a majority of Indonesia's commerce occurs.

Indonesia has soared from relative obscurity just a few years ago to represent more than 40% of Southeast Asia's mobile games market by revenues. Its developmental ecosystem however lags far behind. The country has a mere 1,200 games developers (China has 200,000). Founder of the country's largest game studio Agaté, Arief Widhiyasa, profiles many of the company's initiatives to cultivate a more vibrant ecosystem of gaming studios across Indonesia.

With 73% of deaths in Indonesia caused by non-communicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease & diabetes; co-founder of next-generation healthy food company Lemonilo, Shinta Nurfauzia, describes her mission as using technology to make a healthy lifestyle accessible to everyone. Lemonilo often launches a new product exclusively online, crowd-sourcing feedback from its e-commerce customers, and only then subsequently releasing the perfected product to its 200,000 offline points-of-sales all over Indonesia.

(Podcast website | Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia)

Qoala has played a front-and-center role in modernizing Indonesia's hidebound insurance industry. Company Founder Harshet Lunani however views the role of agents in insurance as remaining key to increasing insurance penetration. Qoala seeks to "Uberise" insurance by removing the tedious complexities of pricing, underwriting and issuance services, and enabling anyone with personal networks to become a modern "agent". Capturing unprecedented digital insights into the customer has allowed Qoala to co-create entirely new families of insurance products with the likes of Traveloka, Tokopedia and others.

(Show website | Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia)

Expert Ajisatria Suleiman joins our first episode devoted to Indonesia technology policy, to explain how policy is synthesised, where current policy priorities are focused, and what we can expect going forward. Having worked with The World Bank, Kominfo and other major institutions, Aji suggests that the public sector should invest more heavily into its own innovation and digitalization in order to achieve more effective policy collaboration with the private sector. Aji also explores major topics of the day such as Digital Identity, Data Privacy and new eCommerce policy developments.

In Part III of our "Hari-Hari Awal" or "Early Days" series, we interview Ajey Gore, Gojek's former Group CTO. Now an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital, Ajey describes as "largely unplanned" his career progression from his early days in Bangalore to Indonesia's most important engineering leadership position. He instead followed this progression much like "water flows across a floor". Ajey is extremely pleased with how Indonesia's engineering community has evolved since his involvement in the region began many years ago. Not only does it more aggressively embrace new technologies, but the community is now much more "self-organising and self-governing."

While many players in Indonesia's hospitality industry were paralysed by the 70-90% declines in occupancy that COVID brought about, leading tech-enabled hotel player Bobobox immediately began to deep dive into behavioural shifts amongst its largely Millenial customer base. In addition to acting on obvious insights such as improved cleanliness and hygiene, the Bobobox team also seized on the growing imperative to work remotely, rolling out its wildly successful Bobocabin and Bobovan products. Company CEO Indra Gunawan also addresses topics including competition, the advantages of the capsule hotel model, and the mission-criticality of technology.

Indonesia's long tail "fragmented trade" of mom & pop's, warungs etc. can be 50-80% of sales for big CPG companies like Unilever & P&G. However, reliable insights into the "sell-out" of a product to the ultimate customer are nearly impossible to achieve, given the labyrinthine distribution networks and low levels of digitization at the retail end-points. Philipp Stegmann, founder of eyos, discusses how the company; which is the product of a merger with London-based RetailTech platform yReceipts; delivers actual actionable insights at point-of-sale to prevent inventory stock-out's, enable timely promotions, and otherwise drive significant supply chain efficiencies. 

Tessa Wijaya, Cofounder and COO of leading payments firm Xendit, details the dramatic shift in payments use cases during the COVID era, away from the embattled online travel segment; and toward other payments scenarios such as crypto exchanges, gaming and edtech. Indonesia's first graduating start-up from the Y-Combinator program, Xendit continues to integrate with leading BNPL providers, SME book-keeping platforms and a host of other fintech solutions to grow both within Indonesia, and increasingly regionally.

Some 18 out of Silicon Valley's 20 largest unicorns have used venture debt in order to reduce shareholding dilution, extend their runway, and accelerate growth with limited cost to the business. Chin Chao and Paul Ong of regional venture debt leader Innoven Capital offer a primer for Indonesian entrepreneurs on this rapidly growing form of fund-raising. Positioned as a "synergistic partner" to their VC counterparts, Innoven commonly connects portfolio companies into the ecosystems of anchor LPs Temasek and UOB.