Moka, an Indonesian mobile point-of-sale startup, gets seed funding from East Ventures

Traditional point-of-sale equipment

Jakarta-based mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) startup Moka announced this morning that it received seed funding of an undisclosed amount from local venture capital firm East Ventures (East Ventures also invests in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page).

Moka seeks to make mPOS capabilities accessible to everyone, by providing solutions for ringing up transactions, accepting payments, and creating reports. But now with Moka, the only thing vendors need in order to implement the cloud-based POS system is an iPad.

“Traditional POS systems are expensive, difficult to use, and involve costly maintenance,” explains 25-year-old co-founder and CEO Haryanto Tanjo. “With Moka, all they have to do is download the app on their iPad, sign up, and start selling.”

Tanjo and fellow co-founder and CTO Grady Laksmono both claim that Moka provides sellers greater security and reliability, as their cloud-based technology also means business owners can access real-time sales data while on the go. Laksmono says, “With our cloud technology, business owners can manage multiple stores and gain critical insights such as the best-selling items at different locations, or items that are running low on inventory.” He adds that because Moka’s system is cloud-based, business owners can get all their sales intel without leaving home.

Moka co-founders, left Haryanto Tanjo, right Grady Laksmono.

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From Silicon Valley to Indonesia

Moka’s co-founders are both young Indonesian natives, whose track records speak for themselves. Tanjo attended UC Berkeley, earning a Bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research in 2009. He graduated at the age of 20 and went on to received a Master’s degree in business administration from UCLA Anderson. He worked at McKinsey & Company in Jakarta before starting Moka.

Laksmono earned a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from California State University in 2009 and a Master’s from the University of Southern California in 2011. His first startup was called trueRSVP (now Planana), which received funding from Tech Coast Angels. He launched the company at the VentureBeat DEMO conference in 2012, and won the DEMOgod Award. Laksmono also worked at Google, Yahoo, Zynga, OpenX, and Albumatic.

When Tanjo was in San Francisco, he created a t-shirt ecommerce company. He also sold his shirts at bazaars in Jakarta. He explains:

“I had to manually keep track of my sales because I couldn’t afford those traditional POS systems that cost thousands of dollars. Furthermore, not being able to take credit card payments was a big downside for me and my customers. I thought: why not build a mobile POS with an integrated payment solution that businesses of any size can use?”

“I met Grady when I moved to LA, and Grady was already exploring the payment gateway market. It was a natural synergy and we both decided to do this full-time when East Ventures decided to fund us.”

Challenging tradition

Tanjo and Laksmono cite direct competitors in traditional POS systems like Raptor and Quinos. Their indirect competitors are software consultants who build custom POS software for clients. Currently, Moka is still in closed beta and therefore has no registered users. Tanjo says it will have its first pilot users in a few weeks’ time.