The rise of Indonesian start-ups is coupled with the rise of venture capitalists in the country. We have seen East Ventures invest in potential start-ups and we also saw CyberAgent Ventures invested in Indonesia’s Tokopedia. There are even more jumping on the Indonesian venture capital bandwagon, namely Nusantara Ventures and InvestIdea.
InvestIdea recently announced its investment in KartuMuu and Bistip. That caught our interest and we managed to grab hold of Charles Gandha, one of the partners at InvestIdea to find out more:
1. Who is the founder of InvestIdea and how big is your team?
All of our partners are Indonesians who had experience studying and working overseas in the high-tech sectors. When we returned to Indonesia, we each started our own ventures before getting together to explore the opportunities of high-tech venture capital in Indonesia. We’re also partnering with Forte Capital in setting up PE & VC funds dedicated towards the TMT (Telecommunications, Media, and Technology) space in the Indonesian market.
2. Can you explain a little bit more about InvestIdea? What is your plan for Indonesia?
InvestIdea is a technology incubator focusing on helping young Indonesian entrepreneurs to develop their cool ideas into real venture businesses. Our goal is to get new tech start-ups going through the initial phase to become serious businesses. Most of the time it means ‘get them to the point where they have built something impressive enough to convince their communities’. The communities we are talking about also include the next round of investors on a larger scale.
We achieve our goal using a set of specific strategies from the experiences of our founders, which follow through from the birth of the idea, proof of concept modeling, until [it's a] legitimate working entity. According to our motto ‘accelerating the next tech stars’, the methodologies indeed speed up the ventures that we support to accomplish what they are right now.
3. At which stage does InvestIdea plan to play? Seed-funding?
Unfortunately, we can only play in the seeding period at the moment, up to the point where startup ecosystems in Indonesia reach their maturity. The situation in the Indonesia tech sector right now is kind of similar with Silicon Valley in the pre-millennium era, when the rule of thumb is first come first gain.
We currently provide seed-funding, strategic & legal counseling, operational guidance, and infrastructure support for our startup ventures to help them transit into high-growth technology businesses.
Our bigger plan is also to play a role in the next corporate capitalizing stages, which are growth and buyout, once the support systems in Indonesia are ready. Until then, we will actively contributing to shape Indonesian high-tech industry into the best possible business model.
4. InvestIdea launched with two start-ups in its portfolio. Why Bistip and KartuMuu?
We actually launched with no startup to support. Our partnership with Bistip and Kartumuu had started through several phases following our methodologies mentioned before. It is such a coincidence that when the media started to cover us, we already had both of them in our portfolio.
The underlying principle for our choice of those investments is mostly due to their potential in Indonesia content consumption trends. In addition, we follow the 20:80 rule when reviewing ideas, 20% on the ideas and 80% on the teams’ DNA. So obviously, the other reason for choosing them is because we have good chemistry with the founders.
We also try to balance our investment between tangible and intangible assets. For example, we invested in a wireless hot-zone provider which has the tangible assets to also function as catalyst for our content products.
5. What are the difference between InvestIdea and other VCs that have already invested in Indonesian start-ups?
Our main difference is that all of our partners have experiences starting their own venture covering software development, convergence technology, and IT infrastructure. InvestIdea inherited the spirit and passion of technology and entrepreneurship in emerging markets. That really set us apart from not only other VCs in Indonesia, but also elsewhere. We are not just investing in our startup ventures, but we become their partners and peers. We go hand-in-hand with the founders through the initial phases to the point where they have built working models. Then we help them nurture the venture into successful and high growth technology businesses.
6. Finally, what kind of start-ups attract your interest?
The biggest trend and opportunity in Indonesia, in our opinion, is something we identify as ‘social commerce’. The potential in Indonesia content consumption is so high due to its big population in the productive ages, and rapid adoption of technology as it becomes the sign of social statuses. So we are interested in the start-ups that focus on consumer-centric internet utilization and mobile business models, which in turn will be the catalysts and key players for the new era of cybernomics in our country.
On the other hand, Indonesians tend to be glued to their mobile devices all the time, something that all of us recently called ‘technology autism’. We’d like [the phrase] ‘make the distant people closer and make a close people distant.’ That is what happens when we are glued to our mobile gadgets all the time. Being a geographically distant country, we also would like our start-ups to become the ‘social bridge’ and yet not make people become anti-social.
In short, the start-ups that catch our attention are the ones with concepts of social commerce and also with the potential to become key players in Indonesia’s cybernomics.
Disclosure: East Ventures invested in Penn Olson.
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