Indonesian edtech firm Arkademi secures investment from SOSV

Indonesian edtech firm Arkademi has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from US-based VC firm SOSV to scale its operations.

Arkademi founders Hilman Fajrian (left) and Resi Dwi Erveny / Photo credit: Arkademi

Established in 2018, the mobile-focused startup provides a massive open online course platform that helps people both learn and teach any certified vocational skill. It offers various learning topics such as digital marketing and entrepreneurship and allows practitioners to upload and share their courses online.

It plans to use the fresh funds to further enhance its product, make new hires, and deepen its roots in the Indonesian market. SOSV’s resources will also help accelerate Arkademi’s growth to better serve the country’s 185 million working age population, said Arkademi founder and CEO Hilman Fajrian.

Indonesian president Joko Widodo last year set a goal to add 57 million skilled workers by 2030. The country’s Ministry of Manpower estimated that to meet this goal and keep up with industrial growth, Indonesia needs to produce 3.8 million skilled workers annually.

Even with this goal, the unemployment rate in Indonesia hovers at around 5%. Fajrian explained that one of the main sources of this problem is limited community access to vocational education, which stems from inefficient implementations and high costs. “Arkademi was created to help overcome [this problem],” the exec said.

In addition to the funding, Arkademi said it will be joining MOX, an SOSV accelerator program focused on the cross-border mobile internet sector. It previously joined the AWS Edstart incubation program facilitated by Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific.

To date, the startup said it has about 50 classes on its platform, provided by 20 institutions. It aims to have about 200 courses and 150 partner institutions this year.