Batavia Incubator’s Takeshi Ebihara: Young Entrepreneurs Will Build Indonesia [INTERVIEW]

Batavia Incubator is one of the latest tech start-up incubators in Indonesia, launched a couple of weeks ago. It is a joint venture between Japan-based incubator Rebright Partners and Corfina Group, an Indonesian financial group.

To learn more about this incubator and what they think about Indonesian start-ups, we interviewed Takeshi Ebihara (pictured below), co-founder & general partner of Batavia Incubator via email. He is also the CEO of Rebright Partners, Inc.

In our conversation with Bukalapak.com’s founder, he said that Batavia is strong in C2C e-commerce. What does your start-up portfolio in Japan look like? Is it mostly in C2C e-commerce?

Our investment activity is focused on internet/mobile service including commerce related service.

Most of them are consumer services, but [there are] some enterprise services like advertisement technology.

Commerce is a very important, big service sector in Internet business. And that becomes true at a relatively early moment in the Internet industry’s progress in every country. We think in Indonesia that moment will be arriving quite soon.

Why did you choose Indonesia? What insight about Indonesia did you have before making this choice?

Actually, Corfina Group (an Indonesian financial group led by our co-founder, general partner, Suryanto Wijaya) has expertise in Indonesian UKMs (Small-Medium Enterprises) investment. Even the Indonesian government assists them through programs encouraging the development of real sectors in Indonesia. So we already knew quite a bit about the Indonesian market.

The size, the level of progress, and the potential of the IT market in this country are suitable enough for us to start activity. Also, the micro economics and geopolitics are well controlled compared with other Asian countries.

We met a lot of young enthusiastic entrepreneurs, including students. They made us realize that the pool of human resources that will build the IT industry in this country is deep and capable. That assures the IT industry’s growth in the very near future.

Why did Batavia Incubator chose Bukalapak.com as your first investment in Indonesia? What’s your plan for Bukalapak moving forward?