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Gabriel Budi Sutrisno · · 7 min readDid the CEO of Indonesian startup Octopus graduate from UC Berkeley?
Moehammad Ichsan, co-founder and CEO of Indonesian waste treatment startup Octopus, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).
At least, that’s what three online sources have stated, starting from 2020. It turns out, however, that the information is untrue.
An Octopus spokesperson tells Tech in Asia that Ichsan attended the university “but he dropped out.” He declines to provide evidence as “this is a private matter and we like to keep it private.”
Separately, Ichsan says to us over a text message that he has “never told anyone” that he “graduated from UC Berkeley.” He adds that he did attend an online course at the university.
Two former Octopus staff contradict this. They insist to Tech in Asia that the founder personally told them that he had graduated from there.
Octopus co-founder and CEO Moehammad Ichsan / Photo credit: Tech in Asia
The same two sources add that Ichsan told them he also had an undergraduate degree from Universitas Indonesia. The CEO tells us that he actually dropped out of the local university.
Tech in Asia sought records from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a US academic verification service, to see whether Ichsan has either attended or graduated from UC Berkeley.
No results can be found, even though we provided a few aliases he might have used. One possible reason for this is that he didn’t study at the university, although the service does mention that a privacy block on his record or a failure in getting his record from the university may account for the lack of results.
Launched in 2021, Octopus has positioned itself as a reverse-logistics startup specializing in the collection of post-consumer products through a circular economy model.
In 2022, the company raised US$5 million in a round led by Openspace Ventures and SOSV, with participation from Orbit Startups.
In an interview with Tech in Asia in the same year, Ichsan said that Octopus’ revenue grew by 26x within one year, and its monthly user count had reached 180,000.
Its B2B clients – those who turn waste into fuel or raw material – include Procter & Gamble and Danone Aqua.
However, Octopus is facing challenges, with allegations of payment delays and salary freezes appearing in Indonesian media beginning December 2023.
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While Moehammad Ichsan says that he has never told anyone about graduating from UC Berkeley, several sources contradict his claim.
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