Ritase provides digital logistics services for trucks connecting shippers and transporters via mobile and desktop apps

Ritase, an Indonesia-based trucking services platform, has raised US$8.5 million in Series A funding led by Golden Gate Ventures, as per a report by DealStreetAsia.

Jafco Asia and ZWC Ventures, along with existing investors including Insignia Ventures, Beenext, and Skystar Capital also joined the round.

Ritase plans to use the funding to focus on growth and new market expansion.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Iman Kusnadi and David Samuel. It provides digital logistics services for trucks connecting shippers and transporters via mobile and desktop application. Using Ritase, users can access a real-time monitoring and reporting for the shipment process.

Also Read: Thai virtual queuing startup QueQ raises US$2.8M; launches in Malaysia

Currently, the company said it covers shipments in all parts of Indonesia and facilitates tens of thousands of shipments per month, with more than 7,500 trucks, 500 transporters, and 7,000 partner drivers connected to its app.

Its portfolios include brands such as Nestle, Unilever, Universal Ribena Corporation (URC), Japfa, Signify/Phillips Lighting, Lotte, and Perfetti Van Melle.

In the ear future, Ritase plans to provide supply chain financing to local transporters and affordable spare parts and trucks through a group buying platform.

Previously, the startup has raised two rounds of funding, totalling US$4.4 million, from Insignia Ventures Partners, Mitsubishi Corporation, Beenext, Skystar Capital, Agung venture capital, and several angel investors.
–

The post Golden Gate invests US$8.5M in Indonesia’s logistics startup Ritase appeared first on e27.

Waresix connects shippers and business with available warehouses and trucks across Indonesia

Waresix​, an Indonesian logistics tech startup, announced today that it has closed US$14.5 million in Series A round of funding led by EV Growth, a Southeast Asia growth fund set up by regional VC firm East Ventures (investor in Tokopedia and Traveloka).

Local VC firm SMDV and Singapore-based Jungle Ventures also joined the round, which comes less than eight months after raising its pre-Series A of US$1.6 million. Previously, the startup raised a seed round in February 2018.

The fresh financing will be used to expand Waresix’s land transportation service and further strengthen its warehousing network to second-tier cities.

“Our mission ​is to simplify logistics and make it accessible for everyone. With this new capital, we want to scale and expand our coverage to support the digital ​transformation of Indonesia’s US$240 billion domestic freight sector,” Andree Susanto, Co-founder and CEO of Waresix.

Also Read: Golden Gate invests US$8.5M in Indonesia’s logistics startup Ritase

“We will continue developing our land transportation and warehousing network to more second-tier cities across the country and make further improvements to the supply chain process. Indonesia is experiencing an infrastructure growth spurt at the moment thanks to the government’s policies, and this spurt will fuel Waresix’s widening coverage as well,” he added.

According to Co-founder and CFO Edwin Wibowo, Waresix will further invest in R&D to enhance its data analytics capabilities. “Our technology will seamlessly merge data analytics with the logistics infrastructure to give businesses complete control of their goods and maximise our suppliers’ space utilisation. This way, Waresix ensures fast and reliable transportation, while keeping supply chain costs low and predictable.”

“In order to achieve our mission to simplify logistics for all. Waresix will also double down on our people investment, particularly those with data science, operations, logistics, finance, design, marketing, and sales expertise,” Wibowo added.

Founded by Susanto and Wibowo, both alumni of the University of California Berkeley, Waresix basically connects shippers and business with available warehouses and trucks across Indonesia. The  aims to improve supply chain efficiency by improving utilisation and removing middlemen. It provides multi-modal services including land and marine transportation, general cargo handling, and cold storage to cater inter-island freight movement across Indonesia.

The company claims it has over 20,000 trucks and 200 warehouses on its platform.

“We’re leveraging our extensive warehouse network to generate demand and create network effect for our trucking ecosystem. By expanding into the trucking business, we can maximise space utilisation and also avoid trucks with empty miles,” according to Susanto.

Also Read: Retrenched and dejected, this entrepreneur proved that a lot can happen over coffee

The archipelagic makeup of Indonesia has resulted in one of the highest logistics costs in Asia, accounting for nearly a quarter of the country’s US$1 trillion gross domestic product (GDP). In its 2018 Logistics Performance Index, the World Bank found that while the country’ logistics sector has improved in recent years, its logistics cost-to-GDP ratio of 24 per cent still lags behind that of regional peers Thailand and Malaysia. This high logistics costs not only hamper Indonesia’s industrial competitiveness, but also add to its SMEs’ cost of doing business in the domestic economy.

The government is currently working to close Indonesia’s infrastructure deficit gap via the ​National Medium-Term Development Plan 2015-2019, which aims to build 2,650 km of roads, 15 airports, 24 seaports, and 3,258 km of rail lines.

The post Indonesian logistics tech startup Waresix seals US$14.5M Series A led by EV Growth appeared first on e27.

Delivering a great customer experience is crucial for the success of your brand

It is a classic case of “can’t see the wood for the trees”: employees at startups and small businesses are often drowning in a never-ending list of isolated tasks, with a range of responsibilities falling on the shoulders of a very lean team. It can become difficult for them to step back and attend to the intricate details of getting customer experience just right.

However, there are plenty of reasons why this is something growing businesses can’t afford to overlook. According to Nielsen’s Global Survey of Trust in Advertising report, most consumers in Southeast Asia (88 per cent) found word-of-mouth recommendations to be the most credible source of information. It has never been more important for businesses to have end-to-end insight into the customer experience, but many aren’t spending enough time focusing on this – and it is a massive loss.

A study by HubSpot Research also found that one customer’s bad experience with a brand could make it harder to acquire new business in future. In particular, the majority of social media users in Singapore are made up of millennials, who make up a large part of the Asia-Pacific workforce. Aged 25 to 34, millennials are more wary of online ads, and tend to trust customer reviews and user-generated content more than other types of advertising techniques.

The customer journey is not linear – there is little point in businesses spending time, money, and resources to “fill the funnel” with traffic and leads via organic search, email marketing, advertising, and so on, without focusing on the end result of that activity: the customer.

Also Read: The essentials of mapping a customer journey across digital assets

Your existing customers can be your biggest source of growth, and if you want your startup to succeed, you need to focus time on turning more of them into brand advocates. But how? The answer lies in improving the customer experience and building customer advocacy programs.

Digital transformation isn’t enough

Every marketer – no matter the size of their budget – should have the ability to see how their efforts are impacting the customer journey and, ultimately, the business’s bottom line.

Of course, technology helps to solve this, but more often than not, businesses are not thinking critically about the technology they are using and its impact on the business. Recent research from HubSpot found that 71 per cent of Singaporean marketers felt their company underinvests in the technology needed to help them do their job to a better standard.

Businesses often don’t have access to a single view of the customer journey because data is siloed in different systems and tools, making it near impossible to identify things that are negatively impacting the customer experience.

Email engagement data lives in your email tool, online ads are managed somewhere else, and customer data lives in a CRM, or more commonly in smaller businesses, a spreadsheet. These systems often don’t ‘speak’ to each other, meaning insights that could drastically improve the customer experience are lost.

This is a missed opportunity for identifying friction in the customer journey that could be negatively impacting the experience your customers have with your brand, and therefore the likelihood that they will become brand advocates.

A scalable ‘tech stack’ is a competitive advantage

Startups and SMEs are in an advantageous position if they get their tech stack right during the infancy of their companies, as their systems will enable scale, instead of hindering it.

There are two options here: hack your systems together as best you can, or use an ‘all-in-one’ system where your tools either come as part of the product or can be seamlessly integrated.

Either way, the end goal is that customer data across all departments lives in one place to provide a single view of the entire customer experience. At the very least, a business’ CRM should be connected to its email marketing tool, so that marketers are able to trigger different emails based on customer behaviour logged in the CRM.

Beyond improving the customer experience, businesses can start to understand what initiatives are driving the most revenue, as they are empowered with the right tools to cross analyse data from marketing channels with the closed deals that have been recorded in their CRM.

Also Read: How startups can defeat challenges in customer satisfaction

When you pair this with post-sale data in the form of customer service calls, support tickets, or repeat purchases, marketers have the data they need to understand which customers might be their strongest brand advocates, and can build effective customer marketing initiatives to facilitate that.

Ultimately, businesses that are empowered with a comprehensive view of the customer experience, and have their tools connected to their CRM, will be much more successful in their pursuit to grow the business.

—

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Image Credit : dolgachov

Join our e27 Telegram group here, or our e27 contributor Facebook page here.

The post Customer experience: The opportunity that growing businesses are failing to see appeared first on e27.

PayU has acquired a majority stake in Red Dot Payment in a transaction valuing the company at US$65M

PayU, the payments arm of South African internet conglomerate Naspers, has announced its foray into Southeast Asia by acquiring Singapore-based online payments solutions company Red Dot Payment (RDP).

Under the terms of the agreement, PayU has acquired a majority stake in RDP in a transaction valuing the company at US$65 million. The founder of RDP will continue to retain a stake in the company, while the majority of other shareholders will exit.

Also Read: Indonesian logistics tech startup Waresix seals US$14.5M Series A led by EV Growth

“We will now provide our existing global merchants access to Southeast Asia with single API integration, thus strengthening our global PayU Hub platform. PayU will continue to look for prospects to reinforce our footprints in this market,” said Laurent le Moal, CEO of PayU.

Randy Tan, CEO, and Founder of Red Dot Payment, added: “It has never been easy for global merchants to enter Southeast Asia as they benefit from RDP’s strong local connectivity combined with PayU’s global footprints and experience. We are pleased that RDP will be part of the Naspers’ fintech portfolio.”

RDP was founded in 2011 to provide payment solutions to enterprises of all sizes, such as online retail, hospitality, charity, and food delivery across Asia and beyond.

As per a Google-Temasek study, Southeast Asia is hailed as one of the fastest growing digital payments markets in the world, home to 350 million internet users across its six largest countries, exceeding that of the population of the US. PayU’s integration with RDP gives it a head-start to offer a cross-border product by offering more local alternative payment methods and connectivity.

 

The post Naspers unit PayU forays into Southeast Asia by acquiring Singapore startup Red Dot Payment appeared first on e27.

Seeing many budding DIY entrepreneurs and popularity mongers on the social platform, one might have the illusion of being capable of starting something from scratch

How many years has it been since Instagram became everyone’s favorite social media platform?

I remember that it used to be a lousy filtered app that people were still figuring out. Look at it now, it has become all shiny and integrated, surpassing even its parent Facebook.

It didn’t take too long before everyone on this app found a way to monetise the heck out of it, so much so that Instagram Business became a natural addition to the platform.

As a consequence, what used to be a platform meant for a photo wall of moments in our lives now sees accounts after accounts being created targeting us by learning about what we just opened and stayed for. So clever that it creeps me out at times.

I’ve had so many moments where Instagram threw an ad about purified water after I chatted with someone on WhatsApp about it and when I didn’t even search for it on it. That happened to me multiple times that I’ve become convinced that the app really got a mind on its own, but that’s a whole lot of another story.

The new normal

I’ve just had a realisation that the app has become an integral part of everyday life that some big decisions can be made entirely out of it, on it, and with it. It’s like democracy.

For me, the most lit– borrowing the term used by the biggest crowd flocking on Instagram, Millennials — chat group I have now is on it. With two other moms whose kids are the same age as mine, we talked about things like our husbands, cute shirts, toddler tantrum, baby recipes, and it never stops.

Also Read: Business scaling 101: What is scaling and how to scale

Why Instagram? Because I parent a lot based on it. I may stay on it for long to share, learn, and get useful tips from the fellow moms who’ve been there, done that, and are still doing it.

It’s my new normal. I woke up and checked on it before opening my emails or WhatsApp, and it gets me going.

The “insta” is for instant

It’s part of my life now, this habit of checking out Instagram to keep up with things. It’s basically my entire down time, so much that I kind of get why people need to detox from it.

It can turn pretty bleak quickly as the scroll never really stops. It just continuously feeds you with stuff that you think you need, from things to updates about other people’s lives.

The most attractive thing about it, I’ve noticed, is how easy it is. We often forget that it’s all presented instantaneously.

Instant meal on how-to-cook videos, instant holiday, instant success, you name it, it is all there flaunted, and we are all there to consume like a bunch of gluttons.

Instagram has become contents that are disguised as a list of important tasks to kill. Addictive.

There’s something for everybody

It’s the dream, isn’t it? That there is something out there for everyone, Instagram delivers it nonchalantly. The things you’ve thought about, if you manage to guess the keywords, you’ll find on Instagram.

I think that’s a large part of why FOMO is a word now. Fear of Missing Out. Instagram eats up on the FOMO phenomenon and makes bucks doing so.

There’s something for everybody just an Instagram away. I’ve lost count of how many times a lightbulb went off in my head about possible products I can offer as an entrepreneur, but the first thing I did was to check if the brand name I thought about was taken already on Instagram, instead of doing proper research like a good entrepreneur.

I’ll hold on to the startup idea, and then found myself getting bombarded on Instagram with businesses already doing what I thought of and putting ads out for it.

Well, did that make me stop? No, it made me jump to another “idea for business inspired by what’s on my Insta feed”.

It was like when Pinterest was the thing that gets ladies thinking that they can start a clothing brand. For me, Instagram convinced me that I should start my own thing already, because of the fact that how easy it should be and how lame I am if I don’t already.

It’s that toxic comparison thing that all moms of Instagram only understand. It’s also that delusional self of mine that gets me spinning for Instagram recognition.

Silly how one app can rule us all if we let it, like a super app those ride-hailing unicorns are trying to become but with more powerful tool: comparison. Silly how Instagram can both empowers you to do something just because and then leaves you feeling like you haven’t done enough.

Turn down the noise

Being mindful of how Instagram should be a thing, but it’s not. Why would you get rid of things that inspire you to do something?

Even so, I found that the more I scroll, the lonelier I get and the more my mind wanders far off. Mostly it laments about how I haven’t done enough because it should be so easy, Instagram should make it easy.

If you suffer from the same condition, my advice won’t be to put down your phone or disconnect for a while, although all of those are still useful if you try to recover from the “Instagrim” effect. My advice would be turning down the noise.

Also Read: 6 reasons why early-stage startups are so vulnerable to time-loss

Instagram is a noisy and crowded place with one and only mission: to make you stay longer and spend.

Don’t stay too long that you give a chance to your mind to wander far off. Don’t spend if you know that it’s just a fleeting trend on Instagram.

I know it’s simple to say, but remember the JOMO, the antithesis of FOMO — Joy of Missing Out. Do you know where I first found out about JOMO? Yes, from Instagram.

So yeah, it’s still integral and my mind would still buzz with ideas that are ready to be sacked the minute I submerge myself in Instagram-level deep research. But until then, I would keep reminding myself to take it somewhere else other than this fad-filled space, somewhere else that’s legit, if I want to take the business idea seriously.
–

Photo by Luke van Zyl on Unsplash

The post Instagram FOMO could be why we have so many startups appeared first on e27.