App for keeping track of your income and expenses gets funded

Just yesterday, a medtech startup scored a seed round from East Ventures. Today, personal finance startup Jojonomic joins East Ventures’ portfolio. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia. For more details, see our ethics policy.)

The app that simplifies bookkeeping  by letting users easily keep track of expenses and income raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

“We are raising money to accelerate growth […]. Even though we are currently testing with the Indonesian market, we are planning to expand to the region […] soon. The funding should give us enough to reach the next stage,” Jojonomic co-founder and CEO Indrasto Budisantoso tells Tech in Asia. He did not elaborate in concrete terms how much runway this would give the startup.

The Jojonomic team

Indrasto’s background is in ecommerce and finance. Before founding Jojonomic, he was the CEO and country head of Groupon Indonesia. Indrasto was also a consultant at Boston Consulting Group and wrote a finance book with the title An Easy Way to Manage Personal and Family Finances, which was published by Indonesian publishing company Kompas Gramedia. 

Willson Cuaca, managing partner of East Ventures, says the VC firm decided to invest in the startup because “financial technology is growing fast in the region, and Jojonomic with its team and executional strength will be able to make use of this opportunity.”

The right time to develop good bookkeeping habits

Jojonomic claims to have thousands of users both on Android and iOS. Indastro did not specify what percentage of this number represents active users.

he startup’s users are coming mainly through organic growth. “Non-organic acquisitions will start soon,” Indrasto says.

Based on an internal Jojonomic survey, the firm claims users ages range from 16 to 56 years. The biggest user group is made up of people from 20 to 30 years old. This is exactly the age bracket Jojonomic wants to reach. According to Indrasto, it’s at this the age that people start their careers, and it’s the right time to develop habits such as keeping track of their consumption, savings, and investments.

“We realize that this app is changing behavior, so there are several things that we do to increase ‘stickiness,’” he explained.

Among those features intended to build a habit around using the app are so-called Jojopoints. Users collect these when doing activities in the app, and can later redeem them in the form of phone credits. Another feature is called Jojobuddies. This lets users share financial tips with friends.

Pro features for businesses

The app’s basic features are free to use, but there are in-app purchases such as a financial goal feature, which gives users more managing options. The feature can be bought for IDR 39,000 (US$2.67) per month, or IDR 399,000 (US$27.29) for one year.