BukuKas co-founders Krishnan Menon (left) and Lorenzo Peracchione (proper) with a BukuKas person
BukuKas, a startup targeted on digitizing Indonesia’s small companies, has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The spherical included participation from Gokul Rajaram, the DoorDash govt, and Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder and chief govt officer of TransferWise.
This information comes simply 4 months after BukuKas introduced a $10 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital India. BukuKas will use its Series B to rent for its engineering and product groups in Jakarta and Bangalore, and launch new providers for retailers.
“We’ve been growing really fast and there was a lot of interest from some very good people,” chief govt officer Krishnan Menon advised TechCrunch. “This is not a capital-need based raise, but more of a tactical raise and having the right people back us long term.”
BukuKas was based by Menon and chief working officer Lorenzo Peracchione, who met whereas working at Lazada Indonesia. Since its launch as as a digital bookkeeping app in December 2019, BukuKas has added new options, together with on-line funds and an e-commerce platform. The app has onboarded about 6.three million companies thus far and now has a complete of three million month-to-month energetic customers. It claims its annualized bookkeeping transaction quantity is $25.9 billion USD, or the equal of about 2.2% of Indonesia’s gross home product.
According to Bank Indonesia, the nation’s central financial institution, there are about 60 million SMEs, although Menon says that quantity could vary from 55 million to 65 million. The majority nonetheless function largely offline, however the push to digitization started even earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, the Indonesian authorities launched a program two years in the past with market Blibi to encourage extra companies to promote on-line, with the aim of serving to extra SMEs go international.
This means there’s a rising roster of startups and providers targeted on serving to small companies go surfing. These embody Y Combinator-backed BukuWarung, WarungPintar, Grab’s Mitra GrabKios and wholesaler-focused CrediBook. India-based Khatabook, one other Sequoia Capital India portfolio firm, launched BukuUang in Indonesia, however has since pulled out of the market.
“There’s obviously a macro shift that’s happening in the market right now. People are rushing to get digitized and people are coming out of a rough year. They started to realize ‘I need to upgrade,’ so there’s a rush to get digitized, to manage their money better, a movement to digital payments,” stated Menon.
BukuKas’ aim is to grow to be an end-to-end software program stack for micro, small and medium enterprises and serve 20 million MSMEs by the top of 2022, with stock administration, invoicing, payment-related analytics and different instruments. The firm just lately took a number of steps towards that aim. In April, it launched BukuKasPay for enterprise house owners to pay suppliers on-line or settle for digital funds, together with digital financial institution accounts and e-wallets like OVO, Dana, GoPay, LinkAja and ShopeePay from prospects. In September 2020, it acquired a digital ledger app known as Catatan Keuangan Harian to develop its market share earlier than launching an e-commerce platform known as Tokko that permits MSMEs to arrange on-line outlets. About 1.three million retailers have created outlets utilizing Tokko within the six months since its launch.
Tokko focuses on retailers who discover huge marketplaces, like Tokopedia, too difficult, and wish another approach to arrange a web based model.
BukuKas’ customers embody warungs (small shops), trend retailers, electronics shops, social commerce sellers and repair suppliers. On common, its customers make a number of thousand U.S. {dollars} per 30 days in income, however some earn as excessive as tens of hundreds of {dollars}.
The app is designed to work as a layer on prime of WhatsApp. For instance, many retailers permit prospects to purchase on credit score, to allow them to use BukuKas to ship automated reminders by means of WhatsApp…
