JAKARTA (TheInsiderStories) - BukuWarung, the financial technology (FinTech) firm for micro and small medium enterprises (MSME) has raised funds from Rocketship.vc, an Indonesian retail giant, and individual investors (who are the early backers of Adyen, Nubank and Revolut). The round size is undisclosed and the company has raised more funding in this round than their Y-Combinator demo day round.
With the new funding, the tech firm seeks to expand its technology and product team in Indonesia, India and Singapore and launch more products and features to digitize micro-SMEs business operations. The apps was founded in 2019 by Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, who previously worked at Carousell.
To date, BukuWarung has served more than 3.5 million registered merchants across 750 cities towns in Indonesia, most of them in tier two and three locations. The startup is recording over $15 billion worth of transactions across its platform and processing over $500 million in payments, leading the market in terms of volumes.
The startup has launched Tokoko, a “Shopify” equivalent that enables merchants to create online storefronts and sell their products. With Tokoko, MSMEs can list products, manage orders, receive payments, track deliveries, and customer chats, via a simple and lightweight mobile-first app.
Tokoko helps merchants to go online and enables social commerce during the pandemic, leading to strong adoption among 500,000 merchants in just two months of launch. Chinmay Chauhan, co-founder & president of BukuWarung stated, “Our focus this year is to enhance our payment offerings and enable more digital payment use cases for our merchants.”
The company is addressing the financial services and digitisation gap that exists among Indonesia’ 60 million MSMEs. Despite contributing around 60 percent towards Indonesia’ $1.1 trillion GDP – these businesses have been left behind in the digital transformation of the nation’ business ecosystem.
He adds, BukuWarung has also focused on strategic partnerships with Warung Pintar and several others to create an ecosystem to serve MSMEs needs, which it believes will be key differentiating factor over competing offerings and enable it to build strong moats and stickiness with merchants.
“Our hyper growth has been driven by a product-led and capital-efficient growth strategy. We believe that merchants need an ecosystem to run their business and hence we launched products such as tokoko and payments last year which enabled them to grow even during COVID,” concluded by Chauhan.
Written by Editorial Staff, Email: theinsiderstories@gmail.com
