Indonesia Weekly Review: 3 Archipelago Startup Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week [10 July – 15 July]

From mergers & acquisitions to fundings and contests, here is the new edition of the Indonesia weekly review – your weekly dose of the latest happenings from the Indonesia startup ecosystem.

GoJek Organises Agile Indonesia Conference

GoJek organised Agile Indonesia Conference (AIC) on July 12-13, 2017 as part of this culture fit. With this, GoJek aim was to bring a three side impact in Indonesia – social impact (bringing an entire archipelago under one umbrella platform), opportunities impact (for Ojek drivers to come on board) and economic impact (providing affordable and convenient services).

As stated by GoJek CTO, Ajey Gore, “We are a tech community. And we want to ensure that the tech community in Indonesia flourishes by creating tech awareness, tech brand. Being part of Agile Indonesia is our attempt to do so.”

GoJek is currently providing around 12 services including house-cleaning services (Go-Clean), automobile repair services (Go-Car), masseur services (Go-Massage) with 10K-20K vendors. However, the company is banking on two prime services – bike taxi service Go-Jek and digital wallet Go-Pay.

Meals Delivery Startup BlackGarlic Closes Operations

Jakarta-based meal delivery startup BlackGarlic will soon be closing its operations. It launched its services in 2015. To date, it claims to have served over 10,000 customers who ordered more than 80,000 meals

In his Facebook post, the founder Michael Saputra wrote, “Dear other startup founders, a journey of building a successful startup is never easy. My success in the previous startup clearly does not guarantee that this one would also follow the same path. Even though we all know that not all businesses would triumph, the experience of having to close down a business that I had built for two years with my co-founder, with all the ups and downs, tears and hard work, still hurts.”

BlackGarlic was the second venture of the founder Michael Saputra. Prior to BlackGarlic, he launched on-demand food delivery service Klik-Eat, later acquired by Japan’s Yume no Machi.

Payments Startup Cashlez Raises $2 Mn From Mandiri Capital Indonesia

Indonesia-based payments startup Cashlez raised $2 Mn in a funding round led by Mandiri Capital Indonesia (MCI), the venture capital arm of state-owned Bank Mandiri. Gan Kapital also participated in the round.

The startup will use the funding for expansion, marketing, and general operational activities. To date, the startup claims to have served over 1000 merchants. It further aims to distribute over 4000 card reader devices across Indonesia.

Cashlez was launched in September 2016 and is one the first Indonesian startups to locally develop a host of payment solutions.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition of Indonesia startup news.

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