The corporate VC arm of Bank BRI Indonesia, BRI Ventures, has partnered with the Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX) to help more local tech startups get publicly listed.
e27 has reached out to BRI Ventures to get more details on what the partnership entails, and the efforts that they aim to make to promote IPO to startups.
Nicko Widjaja, CEO of BRI Ventures, said that even though IPOs generally happen during the later stages of a startup’s development, BRI’s latest fund Sembrani Nusantara will aim to help more tech startups get publicly listed.
“The fund is gearing up to make its first investments in two local champions this month. We’re also seeing a growing roster of limited partners placing capital into the fund. Sembrani Nusantara is currently the only locally incorporated, OJK-licensed VC fund in Indonesia,” he further said.
Sembrani Nusantara will focus on startups in education, agro-maritime, retail, transportation, and healthcare sectors and will be taking a “hyper localised” stance in making investments, Widjaja told Entrepreneur in a separate interview.
Despite the pandemic hit, the stock market has experienced a bearish trend. The trend of digital transformation is said to add more competition to blue-chip companies who are starting to realise that to remain competitive, they must adopt modern technology such as cloud computing, analytics, and artificial intelligence.
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According to BRI Ventures, these conditions are also expected to promise a bullish technology-sector IPO market for years to come.
“The wide-ranging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the VC community to recalibrate and move away from the previous growth-at-all-costs-model to one focused on startups that can survive and carve a path to sustainable growth. But we really can’t have a conversation about this without addressing how to build a healthier landscape in which startups can exit. This means a well-defined path to IPO,” Widjaja concluded.
In order to educate more startups about the benefits of getting listen on the public stock exchange, BRI Ventures and IDX co-hosted a workshop which covered topics such as financial sustainability.
The seminar was held right after the official MoU signing and saw participation from both retail and institutional investors, media, and members of the public.
For BRI Ventures, its most recent moves include investment into LinkAja, one of the leading digital payments brand in Indonesia.
IDX itself has recently appointed Pandu Sjahrir, a serial entrepreneur and startup investor, as one of its commissioners. In an interview with e27, Sjahrir detailed his plan to encourage Indonesian startups to get listed on the platform.
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“What we are doing here is deepening the demand, particularly by having more young investors on board. This is something that starts with education about the capital market,” Sjahrir said.
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Image Credit: Muhammad Rizki
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