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Afternoon News Roundup: JD.id becomes Indonesia’s 6th unicorn after funding from gojek

 

Finance

JD.id to confirm unicorn status after closing funding from gojek

After a rumoured funding from gojek since last year, today Indonesia-based e-commerce company JD.id announced today that it has received an undisclosed amount of funding from gojek, DailySocial has reported.

This round takes the company’s total valuation to over US$1 billion, making it the sixth unicorn in the country after gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka, Bukalapak, and OVO.

At the beginning of last year, JD.id announced a joint venture with gojek and logistics company JX.

JD.id is the Indonesian arm of the strategic collaboration between Chinese e-commerce behemoth JD.com and private equity firm Provident Capital. The latter is also gojek’s backer.

Indonesian e-commerce has reached US$21 billion in valuation according to
e-Conomy SEA report in 2019 and is well on its way to growing to US$82 million in valuation in 2025. JD.id has said that its strategy is to focus on logistics, especially the same-day delivery features.

Sequoia leads US$32M Series C in Indian tech startup Whatfix

Sequoia Capital India, along with existing investors Eight Roads Ventures and Cisco Investments, has invested a US$32 million in Series C funding in digital adoption solutions provider Whatfix.

Also Read: Morning News Roundup: Indonesian e-procurement startup Mbiz raises a US$20M Series B funding

The company reveals that it plans to use the funds to drive product development that unifies the employee experience, improves digital journey across desktop, mobile and web applications, simplifies enterprise-wide search across fragmented content repositories and increases user productivity via workflow automation, personalisation, and BOT-based data entry. It also plans to accelerate expansion into markets such as Europe and Australia.

Whatfix was founded in 2014 by Khadim Batti, CEO, and Vara Kumar, CTO. It seeks to provide a digital adoption platform for enterprises to help drive digital adoption, realise user productivity, and elevate user experience across enterprise applications.

Online food ordering platform Swiggy snags US$113M funding led by Naspers

Online food ordering platform Swiggy has raised a US$113 million funding led by existing investor South African internet giant Naspers. According to a report by ETtech, the new fund is part of a larger US$150 million funding round, bringing the latest capital raising values the company has at nearly US$3.6 billion.

Other existing investors, Hadley Harbour Master Investments and Chinese local services platform Meituan, also participated in the round.

Naspers is its largest investor with around 40.6 per cent stake while Meituan holds 6.35 per cent in Swiggy.

Sriharsha Majety, CEO and Co-founder of Swiggy, said that the company has recently started a grocery delivery service Swiggy Stores, concierge service Swiggy Go as well as scaled-up SuperDaily, an everyday micro-delivery service.

Picture Credit: JD.id

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