Complicated supply chains mean that consumers in Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indonesian cities often end up paying more for goods than their peers in large cities, like Jakarta. KitaBeli is on a mission to change that, with its own distribution network and a direct-to-consumer social commerce app. Today the startup announced that it has raised $20 million in fresh funding led by Glade Brook Capital Partners, along with participation from returning investors AC Ventures and GoVentures, and new backer InnoVen Capital.

TechCrunch covered KitaBeli’s last raise, a $10 million Series A, in March 2021.

The funding will be used to expand into more small cities in Indonesia, and add new product categories like beauty, personal care and mother and baby products.

The startup says it has grown more than 10x in six months and claims to be the largest direct-to-consumer social commerce platform in Indonesia. It now has more than 400 employees.

KitaBeli says Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities make up a $100 billion market, with 200 million consumers that contribute more than 50% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product. But they face more challenges ordering online compared to their peers in Tier 1 cities like Jakarta. For example, long delivery times, higher prices because of complicated supply chains and trust issues because customers don’t know who is selling a product.

To address these, KitaBeli has opened a warehouse in every city it operates in, enabling same-day and next-day deliveries. It procures products directly from brands and principals, resulting in savings that can then be passed on to their customers. Finally, it addresses the trust issue through the social commerce model, in which users gather people from their social networks for group buys.

Co-founder and CEO Prateek Chaturvedi tells TechCrunch that when he moved from India (where his previous startup GetFocus was acquired by Mokapos), he was struck by the differences and similarities between the Indian and Indonesian e-commerce markets. For example, e-commerce in Tier 2 cities was underdeveloped compared to Tier 1 cities.

“On digging deeper, we found that users in these smaller towns are buying online for the first time, and they face trust issues with these faceless services and need help and guidance on using the app,” he said. As a result, KitaBeli experimented with social features in its app, like having agents, called Mitras, in each neighborhood, referrals and group buying.


Fast-moving consumer goods were picked as KitaBeli’s first category because they are frequently purchased. “Since we are direct to consumers, we want users to build a habit of buying with us,” Chaturvedi said.

To buy on KitaBeli, users open the app, place an order, then receive incentives for sharing these purchases with their friends. KitaBeli’s shoppers use it to purchase staples like rice, oil, sugar, milk and personal care items. Chaturvedi said each user generally spends $5 to $10 in every order, and each group usually consists of 5 to 25 people.

KitaBeli is able to scale up its distribution network by opening small warehouses in each city instead of having large distribution centers. “Since we focus primarily on FMCG, we are able to churn our inventory very fast,” said Chaturvedi. “Our system works to minimize the days of inventory for each item. By reducing the amount of stock in the warehouse, we able to reduce the space required as well, which reduces the cost.”

Mental health startup Intellect’s ambitious goal is to be available across the Asia-Pacific, but ensure localized, culturally-competent care in each of the many markets it serves. Today it announced it has added $10 million to its war chest in a Series A extension led by Tiger Global, bringing the round’s total to $20 million. The first half of Series A was announced in January 2022.

Other investors in the extension round include new backers K3 Ventures, JAFCO Asia, Singtel Innov8 and PERSOL Holdings, with participation from returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners and HOF Capital.

Intellect describes this as “the largest venture round raised by any mental health company in Asia.” The capital brings Intellect’s total funding since the Y Combinator alum was founded in 2019 to $23 million, and will be used to launch commercially in more markets, expand its operations and build out its mental healthcare system.

Intellect’s coverage and self-guided programs are available in 15 languages. Though it has a consumer app, the company primarily takes a B2B2C model, with companies offering it as an employee benefit. Its clients include Merck, Philips, Foodpanda, Singtel, Shopee, Omnicom Media Group and abrdn. It currently serves 3 million users in more than 60 countries and has therapists and coaches based in 20 countries.

Founder and CEO Theodoric Chew told TechCrunch that it decided to raise an extension instead of moving onto a Series B because the company is in a strong position and making revenue. “With the current economic climate, we wanted to put it in a better position for the next two years and beyond, so we have a strong war chest and are not distracted.”

Intellect primarily sells to regional hubs with a lot of conglomerates and headquarters. For example, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand are all core markets. Currently, most of its clients are from Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

Intellect’s platform has two components. The first is the tech product, which includes its self-guided programs and app. The second is its clinical team of coaches, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Chew said the company works with professionals in each market to ensure culturally competent care.

“That’s something we have thought very deeply about from day one,” he said. “Essentially, what makes sense for Intellect in each region. It’s about having a product that’s hyper-localized for each culture, each region and country as well. To give an example, when someone struggles in Thailand or in Hong Kong, it’s quite different from Singapore in terms of what stresses they have.”

Though Intellect is available in 15 languages, Chew emphasizes that its goal isn’t just to translate the same material.

“We work with providers in every market, clinicians, psychologists, a team, to make sure that we’re not just translating, but also have examples and scenarios for the local context, and that extends to its own network of providers as well,” he said. “So beyond the app the being localized in pretty much every country in APAC today, we have a whole network of local, native, on-the-ground professionals.”

When someone logs into Intellect for the first time, they are prompted by chat to speak with a provider. Chew said this is important because it results in the most user retainment. “The majority of people in Asia have never seen a professional therapist or coach, so this is a barrel of newness for them.”

The mental wellness tech space in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly over the past few years. A new examples include Meta-backed Ami, MindFi and Thoughtfull, plus a roster of startups focused on specific markets, like Ooca in Thailand or Naluri in Malaysia.

“It’s definitely great to see more and more players pushing and coming to this space,” said Chew. “For us, I think that means there is more awareness and push to expand the category. It’s a huge cultural shift and push that we’re building for. It’s not just going to be a zero sum game from the get-go.”

As for how Intellect differentiates, Chew said the main thing is aiming to be an end-to-end platform for mental health care, ranging from its self-guided programs to psychiatric care.

In a statement, Tiger Global partner Jay Chen said, “With its tech-empowered, end-to-end holistic approach, Intellect is poised to become a leader in offering access to mental healthcare across Asia. We are excited to partner with the Intellect team as it builds a flexible, responsive and modern system for a critical component of healthcare.”

Tech layoffs have hit almost every region in the world, and Southeast Asia is no exception, with companies like Sea, Crypto.com and JD.ID among those affected. In particular, fintech startups—BNPL, credit and lending, and inventory-holding businesses—are vulnerable, like in other parts of the world.

Glints, one of Southeast Asia’s largest jobs platforms with over 30,000 active job listings per month and 40,000 employers, recently issued a report that shows the situation may not be so dour (even though it probably doesn’t feel that way to someone who just got laid off). There still exists a tech talent crunch, even in Singapore, where most layoffs and hiring freezes have happened because it’s regional headquarters for many international businesses and a startup hub.

“It’s a correction in general. I think what we have seen is that there has been a lot of capital being pumped into the tech industry over the past two to three years in a major bull run. With that, we had a lot of companies that have also expanded rapidly,” said Glints co-founder and CEO Oswald Yeo told TechCrunch.

“Singapore companies seem to be responding the most quickly to the changes in the macroeconomic environment,” he added, “Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because for some of these changes, you want to move quickly,”

Teams that have been hit hardest include operations, financial and human resource departments, plus some sales and marketing teams.

A lot of new hiring will happen remotely, with companies turning to Vietnam and Indonesia, which have both seen less layoffs, for top tech talent. This is fueled in part by the willingness for a decentralized workforce created by the pandemic.

“Together with the cost saving measures because on the one hand, comfort in remote hiring has increased because of the pandemic,” Yeo said. “Then on the other end, there is this need to save costs. So from both a human capital angle and a financial capital angle, a lot of companies are now actually doing more remote hiring. On Glints, for example, we see remote job opportunities has grown by 10 times over the past year.”

In Malaysia, regional companies still hire cross-border, but local companies have shifted back to local hiring. Glints said they do not expect mid- to senior-compensation to drop from current levels, but junior talent compensation might be affected.

Another new trends is fixed-term, usually one year, contracts, that allow companies to better predict their financial outlook. “Employers are more cautious of committing themselves to permanent contracts with employers,” said Yeo.

“It’s not all doom and gloom in two ways, and there are still positives,” Yeo said. For example, he said there is still disproportionate demand for technology and product talent on Glints, with the ratio in job seekers’ favor.

Layoffs also give startups a chance to build their core teams.

“For companies who are in good position and can afford it, it’s actually a great time to strengthen the bench, shape the management bench and the leadership bench with top management talent because there’s now a little bit less competition for talent.”

According to the World Bank, Indonesia produces 4.8 million tons of plastic waste each year that is “mismanaged”—meaning it ends up uncollected, chucked into dumpsites or leaked from improperly managed landfills. Octopus wants to reduce that number with a platform that makes it easier to collect back waste products from consumers and recycle it into raw materials that brands can reuse. The Jakarta-based startup announced today it has raised an oversubscribed round of $5 million led by Openspace and SOSV.

Octopus was founded last year by Mohammad Ichsan, Hamish Daud, Niko Adi Nugroho, Rizki Mardian and Dimas Ario, who have known each other for over a decade.

After recently launching in Jakarta, it will use its new funding for “aggressive expansion,” including five sorting facilities and 1,700 checkpoints in four cities: Jakarta, Bandung, Bali and Makassar, with the aim of handling 380 tonnes of waste, ranging from plastics to electronic appliances, each month.

Ichsan said one reason he founded Octopus was because he returned to his parents’ house in Makassar for a holiday, and found that a landfill 30 kilometers away emitted an unbearable stench, especially considering that he had a newborn daughter.

“I wondered what kind of world she’s going to live in,” he told TechCrunch. “Apparently this problem is not happening in certain cities, but also in other cities in Southeast Asia so I started to explore more of the business by doing manual waste trading and trying to solve the problem one step at a time, starting with reducing recyclable waste that ends up in landfills by doing manual waste trading.”

Around that time, Ischan met co-founder Daud, who had the same concerns and had been doing research about ocean waste.

Octopus also points to Indonesian government regulations about waste collective referred to as 3R, or “reuse, reduce, and recycle,” that are meant to reduce the amount of plastic ocean debris in the ocean by 70%. The government has reinforced these goals with initiatives like waste banks, enforcement of recycling goals for brands and producers, and a fee on plastic bags for consumers.

Octopus says that as of 2025, the Indonesian government will have spent $5.1 billion on creating a circular economy for more brands. It claims to be “the first platform to offer an end-to- end recyclable waste management logistics platform.”

The company says that over the past six months, it has grown by over 400%, with users at both ends of the supply chain. This includes 150,000 monthly users and more than 60,000 pelestari, or independent waste collectors. It claims that more than 12,000 pelestari have been able to open a bank account since joining Octopus. On the other end of the supply chain, Octopus serves more than 20 brands, including global FMCG companies who use Octopus to help meet their ESG compliance. One of its goals is to reach 100,000 pelestari by 2024.

Octopus offers two main kinds of service, said Ischan. The first one is selling post-consumer materials to the recycling industry and the second is data collection reporting for FMCG brands. For example, it help Softex Indonesia collect used diapers from consumers with proper handling standard-operating-procedures from pelestari, who operate as gig workers.

For pelestari who don’t own a mobile phone to access Octopus’ app, Ischan said the company is working with social welfare bureaus to provide phones as part of local city government programs to solve unemployment in their areas.

In a prepared statement, Openspace founding partner Shane Chesson said, “Octopus is leading the way in using technology to create a step change in the size of the circular economy in Indonesia. Participants at all stages of this supply chain are incentivized to make this happen and most importantly, environmental imperatives need us to get this right.”

Creating and grading tests is one of the most time-consuming tasks teachers need to deal with. In Vietnam, a startup called Azota wants to help with an online software platform that not only helps educators develop and proctor tests, but also automatically grades them using information from Vietnamese teaching materials. The company announced today it has raised $2.4 million in pre-Series A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures. 

Founded last year, Azota now counts 700,000 teachers and 10 million students in primary, secondary and high schools among its users. It says that during peak test periods, it serves over six million users each month, or about 30% of the total number of teachers and students in Vietnam. It claims it can cut down the grading process from two hours when done manually to just two minutes. 

Azota’s creation came amidst the pandemic in 2021. Before co-founding the startup, Au Nguyen, its CEO, worked for Viettel, one of the largest telecoms in Vietnam. He led an educational unit on school management solutions, but realized that educators had many pain points that his team could not solve. As a result, he decided to team up with his friends, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to create Azota. 

“As the team sees it, there are two major scopes of work for teachers: teaching and assigning and grading tests,” they told TechCrunch in an email. “During the COVID times, teaching had to go online, and there were numerous tools to support this change such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Team, etc. But when it comes to online assigning and grading, there were few tools available, which made the process very labor-intensive and time-consuming.” 

Azota built an optical character recognition app to automatically recognize Q&A’s from test images taken from teachers’ phones. It shuffles those questions and answers to create hundreds of modified test combinations. Since the OCR was built using Vietnamese teaching materials, the team said it can recognize Vietnamese tests with a 99% accuracy rate. 

Azota’s founders are also working on a more advanced question bank features that will allow teachers to pick and chose from its inventory to create exams from scratch. 

The startup is used by educators across the nation, with about 22% coming from the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and the rest distributed equally among all provinces in Vietnam, they added. 

The team identifies two main groups of competitors. The first are big corporations that provide learning management software (LMS) to schools, but they say it’s still a fragmented market in Vietnam with different companies dominating different regions.

The second are startups that provide tools for teachers, but Azota’s founders say the teaching tool segment is still early and Azota differentiates by using a product-led growth model, solving teachers’ main challenges as they grow, especially for assigning and grading, instead of trying to address every issue that comes up. 

In a prepared statement, GGV Capital global managing partner Jixun Foo said, “Using technology to empower teachers to teach better, Azota makes great education accessible to millions of students. They can unleash the true potential of teachers to groom the next generation of Vietnamese youth.”

In Indonesia, many logistics providers still use old-fashioned systems to track their operations and fleets, including pen-and-paper ledgers. McEasy wants to change that. The startup, which develops software-as-a-service solutions for the logistics and supply chain industry, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding led by East Ventures.

The startup was founded in 2017 by Raymond Sutjiono and Hendrik Ekowaluyo, and now serves more than 200 clients, including Cleo Pure Water, KMDI Logistics, MGM Bosco Logistics, Rosalia Indah and the Tanto Intim Line.

Its software and smart tracker, called Vehicle Smart Management System, has been adopted by users like passenger buses, freight forwarding services and refrigerated vehicles used to transport pharmaceuticals, meat, seafood, dairy and frozen foods. Other products include Mobility Software-as-a-Service to digitize vehicles for real-time tracking, solutions for improving business efficiency and an open API ecosystem.

The new capital will be used on developing products for SMEs and establishing a stronger foothold in Indonesia’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. McEasy says it has grown more than 12x in the past 18 months.

Sutjiono told TechCrunch that he met and became best friends with Ekowaluyo while both were studying mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The two then worked at Ford in structural engineering. Sutjiona said Ekowaluyo is an expert in structural design and program management in cars, while he focuses more on engine electronics, system control and data handling.

After returning to Indonesia, the two started McEasy to produce hybrid motorcycles. But after researching the market, they realized that the market was shifting to digital instead of hybrid bikes, so they came up with a smart tracker for motorcycles. But because the trackers were cost-prohibitive, they decided to do another shift to B2B logistics and automotive.

“B2B logistics players were still using the conventional method, and we wanted to make a digital solution to improve the business process,” said Sutjiono. “The logistics sector was chosen because of its promising potential and growth during the pandemic. Indonesia has more than 22.5 million units of passenger vehicles and more than 5 million units of freight cars.

The founders say that more than 85% of businesses in the transportation and supply chain sectors still use paper ledgers for their operations, including managing drivers, expenses, fuel consumption and route efficiency. To convince people to move from their legacy systems to McEasy, it offers a free trials and is growing its operations through word of mouth.”

In a prepared statement, East Ventures co-founder Willson Cuaca said, “McEasy has managed to accelerate positively in this post-pandemic environment. They combine the best of both worlds – logistics and technology – to elevate their offerings, strengthen their national footprints, and maintain profitability levels.”

Live in India, Singapore-based MarketWolf has plans to introduce stock trading to first-time investors in more markets. The platform announced today it has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Singaporean venture capital firm Jungle Ventures and Mumbai-based Dream Capital. Returning investors 9Unicorns, iSeed, Crescent and Riverwalk also participated.

This brings MarketWolf’s total raised to $17.4 million since it was founded in 2017 (it launched in India in 2020). The new funding will be used to build product suite and on hiring for its product, marketing and engineering teams.

MarketWolf wants to making trading accessible to first-timers with low minimum investment amounts and a risk management system, as well as modules for practicing and learning about investing. They can invest in options, futures, ETFs and stocks, starting at $5. Most of its users are in the 18 to 35 year old age bracket.

MarketWolf’s risk-management features include setting mandatory risk and reward levels, listing only liquid instruments, preventing selling of options to avoid unlimited risk and its practice and learn module.

Founded by Vishesh Dingra and Thomas Joseph, MarketWolf says it has seen over 1.5 million app downloads in India over the last 18 months and that its number of trading accounts and retail active clients have grown 10x year-over-year. It was listed among the top 15 brokers in terms of trades by India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) in 2021.

Before co-founding MarketWolf, Dingra worked at Merrill Lynch and Barclays Capital, building quantitative models and strategies for algorithmic trading in capital markets.

He told TechCrunch that he and Joseph wanted to launch an investment app because “we saw that existing products were focused on investing for long-term only, and short-term trading was overlooked. Thomas and I have worked at trading desks in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, etc. and understood that there could be an easier, more engaging and risk-managed way of trading made available to people globally.”

The startup is among a number of investment apps based in Southeast Asia that have raised funding–and are continuing to raise). Just over the past month, wealth management platform PINA, Indonesian crypo trading app Pintu and Vietnam’s Anfin, also for first-time investors, have all raised venture capital.

Dingra said MarketWolf differentiates from other investment apps with its gamified interface (many of its users come from mobile gaming communities) and a trading-first approach.

“Most brokerages in the market are investment-first products, whereas MarketWolf is a trading-first product creating its own new market segment—people who can trade well in all market conditions, bullish, bearish, flat or volatile,” he said.

In a prepared statement, Jungle Ventures principal Arpit Beri said, “Retail participation in the stock market in India continues to remain abysmally low at ~3-5% and we believe that MarketWolf has the right product, as well as the right team and expertise to break-through this market.”

Indonesia’s construction industry is large and growing quickly, but a lot of supply procurement is still done the old-fashioned way, through phone calls and text messages. Juragan Material wants to make things easier with a B2B marketplace for building materials from curated suppliers.

The company announced today it has raised $4 million in seed funding led by Go-Ventures, with participation from Susquehanna International Group (SIG).

The new capital will be used for hiring, increasing Juragan Materials’ market share and technological enhancements.

Founded in 2021, the company’s marketplace currently has more than 9,000 products and over 180 brands, including structural, architectural, mechanical and electrical products. It is meant for use by contractors and project owners, and helps them source materials more quickly.

Before launching Juragan Materials, Tito Putra, CEO and co-founder, was a managing director of a building contractor firm.

All the startup’s other founders also have experience working in the construction industry. Chief operating officer Graceila Putri was a product associate at Amazon and worked on growth for a building contractor firm. Chief marketing officer Ricky Fernando previously worked in marketing and relations as Mortindo, a mortar producer, and chief procurement officer Meichael Surja was an architect and contractor on residential products for more than 15 years.

Putra said it often took days for him to source a single item, including time spent checking with multiple vendors for pricing and availability.

He also dealt with deliveries that could not be tracked and arrived late and offline payment and invoicing processes that were long and frustrating. This resulted in high working capital costs and potential losses because of overstocks and over- or under-supply.

Juragan Materials was created to simplify the last leg of the supply chain for the construction industry.

“We recognized that construction is a huge market that is still very conventional and untapped by technology, resulting in a lot of inefficiencies happening in the industry,” Putra said.

Juragan Materials new capital will be used to improve its platform and launch more features, scale-up its customer and vendor acquisitions and enhance its supporting infrastructure, particularly financing and logistics, Putra added.

Indonesian wealth management app PINA’s founding team

While many of Indonesia’s investment apps are focused on hooking first-time investors with low fees and starting deposits, PINA is targeting the middle-to-upper classes with wealth management services. The app announced today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from AC Ventures, Vibe.VC and Y Combinator, with participation from XA Network.

The company was founded in 2021 by Daniel van Leeuwen, the former country marketing head of Grab Indonesia. He is joined by technical co-founder Fajar Kuntoro, who was previously head of tech and engineering at Indonesian digital agency Mirum, Christian Hermawan, founder of Trust Securities and Hendry Chou, previously product design lead at edtech startup Zenius.

Van Leeuwen told TechCrunch that PINA was created because of the founders’ own challenges with personal finance. As a result, they wanted to make sure that all Indonesians have access to financial advice, not just people who are able to afford the fees and minimums charged by personal wealth advisors.

He said that Indonesian’s middle- and upper-class now includes 52 million people, and PINA was created to give them access to investment services without high minimums and fees as they invest for goals including buying a home, retirement and their children’s education.

“Our firsthand experience working with private financial service providers made us realize that change would never come from existing providers,” Van Leeuwen said. “Chou, Fajar and I worked at [Indonesian conglomerate] Mirum where we consulted large financial service brands on how to digitize and transform their businesses. It opened our eyes to the problems and opportunities in making wealth management accessible but also frustrating when we saw our clients’ inability to bring viable products to market due to their dated infrastructure and business models.”

PINA is among several Indonesian investment apps that have recently raised venture capital. A few examples include Pluang, GoTrade, Bibit, Ajaib, Pintu and Pluang.

Van Leeuwen said current solutions are great for first-time and new investors by charging low minimums, but PINA differentiates with its focus on integrating planning, money management and planning in one platform. “By bringing everything together in one platform, we aim to provide an experience they could never replicate with a human advisor or with a finance folder on their phone full of point solution apps,” he said.

Using PINA’s money management tools and advisors is free, and they monetize by charging when customers make an investment through the platform. Features include automatically-managed portfolios, and investing that needs more involvement from users. PINA also has customized financial advice, automated money management and investing tools in its apps.To use PINA, users link all their financial accounts to the app, and set their savings and investment goals.

PINA’s automatic diversified portfolios work by first determining a user’s investment goals, time horizon, risk tolerance and priorities. Then it invests in a portfolio of low-cost mutual funds. Van Leeuwen said its software automatically rebalances investments, selling ones that rise above users’ target allocation and buying more of ones that fall below it. This is done when users fund their portfolios or when portfolio drift reaches 5%.

As for its wealth management features, Van Leeuwen said PINA “aims to bridge the so-called ‘advice gap’” by providing financial advice that is both affordable and personalized. By linking their financial accounts, including their bank accounts, e-wallets, state pension and investment accounts, users are able to see their net worth, monthly cash flow and how their budget has fluctuated over the past few months. The app also allows them to book a slot with a certified financial advisors.

PINA plans to use its funding on user acquisition and by building out its advisory and investment features and complementary services like access to career coaching and exclusive member events.

In a prepped statement, AC Ventures founder and managing partner Adrian Li said, “The rising adoption of non-cash transactions along with the increase in mass affluent individuals in Indonesia has enabled new billion-dollar opportunities to emerge for wealth management platforms that offer a full stack of services including money management and investing. The team at PINA brings in-depth knowledge and connection with the financial services industry—making PINA one of the most promising companies in the field.”

Mapan’s team, with CEO Ardelia Apti in the front

In Indonesia, arisans are traditionally rotating savings and credit associations (RSCA) that let groups of people, primarily women, save and borrow money together. Mapan digitized that concept, and turned it into a service where users, also mostly women, can use it to pay for goods and services. The company announced today it has raised a Series A of $15 million. The round was co-led by Patamar Capital and PT Astra Digital Internasional, a subsidiary of conglomerate PT Astra International Tbk (also known as Astra International).

The round included participation from BRI Ventures, SMDV, Blibli, Prasetia Dwidharma, Flourish Ventures and 500 Global.

Mapan says it helps people get access to financial services in a country where 51% of adults are unbanked, or don’t have access to a bank account. Mapan is currently available in Java, Bali, Sumatera, Nusa Tenggara and Sulawesi, with plans to expand into the rest of Indonesia. It currently claims more than three million members.

The new capital will be used to expand Mapan’s product range and partner with more suppliers for its marketplace of goods for resellers. It also wants to make Mapan Arisan available to 10 million households in Indonesia by 2026.

Mapan, which means “steady” in Bahasa Indonesian, was founded in 2009. The company recently appointed Ardelia Apti as its CEO. Before working at Mapan, Apti spent five years at Gojek as part of its GoTo Group, where she helped build Swadaya, its benefits program for Gojek drivers, and also led GoPay’s offline payments. Before that, she was country director for AI company Element, Inc. and a McKinsey consultant.

At 13 years old, the startup is one of the first of a growing and diverse number of tech companies targeted toward Indonesians and SMEs that find it difficult to access traditional financial services. A few of the others TechCrunch has covered include earned-wage access startup GajiGesa; Super, a social commerce startup for rural areas; Jeff, which is building alternative scoring and other fintech products for Southeast Asia; SME working capital platform KoinWorks; and InfraDigital to digitize cash tuition payments for schools.

Apti told TechCrunch that Mapan’s founding team saw that “many existing commerce, income and financial solutions are not in favor of low-income communities. They require more effort and costs to be able to get the goods they want in a way that is affordable to them. Likewise, there are ways to earn income, many of which require time, capital and expertise that are difficult to access for this target market, especially women.”

When it was founded, Mapan was known was RUMA and enabled warungs, or small neighborhood stores, in rural areas to become bill and phone credit sellers. Apti said the company pivoted to focus on Mapan Arisan, launching the app in 2015 because it saw how many arisans were used by its target audience, and wanted to digitize the concept.

The company’s also introduced other products, including a bills payment features called Mapan Pulsa, and Mapan Mart, a platform where resellers can select consumer products from Mapan’s marketplace or buy for themselves.

Mapan Arisan groups have to have at least five members, and are used for goods and services, including kitchenware, electronics and furniture worth about 200,000 IDR (or about $13.48 USD) to 3 million IDR (about $200 USD), instead of cash. Apti said that “based on our research, social fintech with such a purpose is more needed by the low income community” and gives them the motivation to complete an arisan process.

Leaders of Mapan Arisan groups, called Mitra Usaha Mapan, or MUM, use its app to determine the shuffle dates of Arisans, or when each member gets their goods or services. Apti said that the winner of each raffle is decided through an algorithm to ensure fairness.

MUMs also get benefits including cashback commissions based on the total transactions or group value at the end of the Arisan and a loyalty program that can redeemed into a variety of benefits, including e-wallet credits, gold bars, motorcycles, different types of savings and house down payments. They also help Mapan grow by upselling its members to the company’s other services. Apti said that since 2009, the company has had 250,000 MUMs.

Mapan monetizes through the difference between its selling prices and purchase price from its supplier. Apti said that providing large-scale access to mid- to low-income communities in a cost-efficient way compared to their traditional channels means Mapan is able to offer better prices.

In a prepared statement, Patamar Capital partner Dondi Hananto said, “The concept of Arisan has been core to Indonesian culture for many years, and by digitizing it, Mapan brought scalability to the age-old practice.”

Salary Hero wants to provide lower-income Thai workers with more financial flexibility. The startup, which focuses on earned wage access and finance education, with plans to add neo banking products, too, announced today it has raised $2.8 million. The funding included participation from Global Founders Capital, M Venture Partners, 500 Global, 1982 Ventures, Titan Capital and Thai corporations and angel investors.

Salary Hero was founded in late 2021 by former Bain & Co. Bangkok executives Jonathan Nohr and Prabhav Rakhra. Both were also former bankers at Credit Suisse and Barclays. Other members of the founding team include Tep Neeranatpuree former head of corporate sales at Lalamove, and Thanakij Pechprasarn, former CTO at edtech startup Gantik.

Salary Hero’s team

Rakhra said that while working at Bain, he and Nohr focused on financial services engagements. “With our common backgrounds both being in investment banking, and while working on strategy cases for various banks in Southeast Asia, we experienced how banks continuously de-prioritize lower income customer segments,” he told TechCrunch. That is because they aren’t as profitable as affluent demographics. As a result, Rakhra added, lower-income customers end up paying more than wealthier individuals for the same basic financial services.

“It seems fundamentally wrong that people with fewer means should pay more for financial services, if they have access at all,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to use technology to help level the playing field in Thailand and Southeast Asia.”

By being able to access their earned wages on demand, workers are able to better handle emergencies and unforeseen expenses, instead of being forced to borrow from lenders who charge 10% to 30% interest per month, Rahkra said. “These compounding rates lead to cycles of debt that are very hard to break free from,” he said. “Additionally, financial uncertainty and a lack of a financial safety net creates a lingering feeling of insecurity, and is the main cause of mental stress among workers.” He added that 80% of Thai workers who make less than $1000 USD a month have used loan sharks at some point.

The company says it has seen double-digit week-on-week user growth in 2022 among its clients in the manufacturing, logistics, hospitality and retail sectors. Salary Hero works with companies with as little as 100 staff members on their payroll, but their initial focus is on companies with a full-time headcount of between 500 to 50,000. Rakhra said that by addressing the financial needs of their workers, companies are able to improve employee satisfaction and reduce turnover in a competitive labor market. The company monetizes by charing a low access fee for its earned wage access, but does not charge interest or other hidden fees, Rakhra said.

In the future, Salary Hero plans to add neo banking products, including at-source savings accounts, insurance products, remittances and other financial services like micro-investments and debt restructuring advice. These other products will go live in 2023, while Salary Hero’s earned wage access and financial education features are already live.

In a prepared statement, M Ventures Partner CEO Mayank Parekh said, “We’re proud to be backing Salary Hero, supporting their innovative solution for employers to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive labor market. The future of payroll is one where we say goodbye to traditional pay cycles. Salary Hero empowers workers, and at the same time, solves immediate challenges for employers-driving retention, recruitment and productivity of their workers.”

Last year saw a huge funding boom for Southeast Asian consumer investment apps and if Pintu’s funding announcement today is anything to go by, that looks set to continue. The cryptocurrency-focused app has raised a $113 million Series B from Intudo Ventures, Lightspeed, Northstart Group and Pantera Capital.

Launched in April 2022, Pintu bills itself as “Indonesia’s leading homegrown crypto assets platform.” This is the third round of funding the startup has landed in little over a year. The first was a $6 million Series A announced in May 2021, and the second was $35 million in Series A+ funding just two months later. At the time, Pintu chief operating officer Andrew Adjiputro told TechCrunch that it raised an A+ instead of moving onto a Series B because its focus on product development and execution remained the same.

Now 10 months later, Pintu chief marketing officer Timothius Martin tells TechCrunch that it has added more tokens, making more a total of 66 available, with more added each month. The app also added additional payment channel integrations; Pintu Staking, which lets users stake their Pintu Token; and Pintu Earn, a product that enables them to earn an up to a 15% annual percentage yield (APY) on selected crypto assets which are paid hourly with no lock-up period. Users can top-up or withdraw their Earn wallet at any time.

According to data from the Indonesian Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (Bappepti), the number of crypto investors in Indonesia doubled over the past year to more than 12 million traders, compared to 7 million domestic public equity investors. But since crypto asset ownership still only has a 4% penetration rate among the population, Pintu’s team notes that it has plenty of room to grow. Pintu is registered and licensed by Bappepti.

The app is geared toward first-time cryptocurrency investors, primarily Gen Z and millennials with features like Pintu Academy, an educational program. It lets them invest in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. It currently says over four million people have installed the app, up from 500,000 in May 2021. The app also has communities with a total of 790,000 members across Telegram, Discord, Instagram and TikTok.

The company will use its latest funding, which brings its total raised to about $156 million, to add more tokens and supported blockchains and new products. It plans to expand its Pintu Academy program to, as it they put it, “help traders understand both the opportunities and risks of crypto investing and promote healthier and sustainable trading practices.” It will also perform additional hiring, having already doubled its team to 200 in 2021.

The pandemic spurred interest in retail investment last year, and as the pandemic subsides, Martin said “we see that the market is more mature now compared to last year. Users are starting to make investment decisions based on the use-cases of the crypto assets. For example, gaming is a big thing in Indonesia with over 100 million gamers in the country. This spurs significant growth in gaming and metaverse-related crypto assets, as many believe that these projects are contributing to the future of gaming.”

In a prepared statement, Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra said, “We are excited to continue our journey with Pintu and to welcome our new partner Northstar Group. Since our investment in August last year, Pintu has scaled 5x to become the country’s leading retail focused crypto brokerage, and hired one of the strongest teams we’ve seen in this market. The crypto wave is entering mainstream adoption globally and Pintu is building a generational company in this category.”