Bukalapak scores $50m from Line parent Naver and Korea’s Mirae

Bukalapak, Indonesia’s fourth unicorn, today announced it has raised funding from the Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund. The round amounted to US$50 million, Reuters reported, citing a statement from South Korean financial services group Mirae Asset.

Mirae set up the growth fund together with Naver, the parent company of Japanese social messaging app Line.

“We hope this partnership will accelerate our technological innovations in leveling up small businesses in Indonesia,” said Fajrin Rasyid, a co-founder and president of Bukalapak.

One way the company serves small businesses is through Mitra Bukalapak, an app that allows kiosks in Indonesia to sell digital products like phone credit as well as inventory from Bukalapak’s site.

Since first launching the program in mid-2016, Bukalapak claims to have partnered with over 500,000 kiosks and 700,000 individual sellers across the country. It has also entered the fintech space, recently launching a digital wallet called BukaDana and tying up with digital lender Akulaku to offer installment payment plans to customers.

According to Rasyid, the company currently clocks in IDR 4 trillion (or US$283 million) in monthly gross merchandise value (GMV). It also claims to have more than 2 million transactions per day and 50 million users in Indonesia.

For comparison, regional player Shopee – currently the top ecommerce platform in Southeast Asia and Indonesia – posts somewhere between US$575 million and US$608 million in monthly GMV for its six Southeast Asian markets, based on the company’s estimate for 2018.

Tokopedia, another Indonesia homegrown ecommerce platform, does not disclose GMV figures. It raised a mammoth US$1.1 billion round late last year to evolve into infrastructure-as-a-service, which – among other things – includes a similar product called Mitra Tokopedia.

Bukalapak’s new funding follows an undisclosed round in January 2018. The company’s past investors include Emtek, Ant Financial, and Government of Singapore Investment Corporation.