BukuWarung co-founders. Left to right: Chinmay Chauhan, Abhinay Peddisetty
Indonesian fintech company BukuWarung has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from several investors in the US and Asia as part of its Y-Combinator demo day.
Backers in the round include partners of DST Global, GMO Venture Partners, Soma Capital, HOF Capital, VentureSouq, 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 angel investors from WhatsApp, Square, and Airbnb.
This gives the company over eight-figure US dollars in funding, spread over three rounds in 2020.
The fresh funds will be used for hiring and product development so that the company can continue to build a range of financial services on the app by integrating monetisation products such as payments, credit and savings.
On the development front, BukuWarung has also recently partnered with major Indonesian fintech companies such as OVO and Dana to launch a digital payment feature, which it claims to be the first of its kind in the region.
BukuWarung is a fintech company which makes it easier for Indonesian micro-businesses to manage cash and credit transactions.
Also Read: How BukuWarung is changing the back alleys of Indonesia
The company was started by Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, who were former executives at Carousell and Grab. They said that coming from families from small neighbourhoods that ran small stores, they were “fully aware of the operational challenges that small businesses face” which led them to launch the startup.
Since its inception in 2019, BukuWarung has more than 1.2 million merchants on its platform across 750 cities and towns in Indonesia and claims to have recorded several billion US dollars in gross transactional value, which grew by 100 times in 2020.
“Our hyper-growth 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 and engagement among underserved merchants who’re coming online as a business for the first time,” said Chauhan.
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Image Credit: Buku Warung
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