5-month-old Indonesian startup banks $600k from Golden Gate and Antler

(L-R) Two of the three Sampingan co-founders Margana Mohamad and Wisnu Nugrahadi / Photo credit: Sampingan

Gig work is booming in Indonesia. About 55 percent of businesses in the country hire freelancers, compared to the region’s average of 44 percent. But the country’s workforce productivity leaves much to be desired.

Former Go-Jek manager Wisnu Nugrahadi and his co-founders Margana Mohamad and Dimas Pramudya are looking to change this. They’ve built Sampingan, an online marketplace that connects companies with freelancers who can help them with certain business tasks.

Sampingan joined Singaporean startup builder Antler’s first cohort in July. Today, the team announced that it just bagged US$500,000 in seed funding from Golden Gate Ventures, also based in Singapore. This follows a US$100,000 pre-seed round from Antler in September.

So far, Sampingan has onboarded 1,500 agents in 25 cities across Indonesia who have collectively completed more than 30,000 tasks.

The idea

Sampingan’s pool of freelance “agents” are vetted by an in-house team who verifies their identities and investigates their past work experience. By looking into these factors, the startup can better match those agents to specific tasks.

To increase productivity, the startup’s in-house team also personally trains the agents via online or offline sessions to equip them with soft skills. To be able to take specific projects, freelancers will also have to complete product knowledge training on Sampingan’s app.

The three founders first hatched the idea at a cafe when Mohamad, who was running a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm at the time, shared his struggles acquiring service providers for a startup he was working with. The trio then got to talking about how the process could be improved, recalls Nugrahadi, who was in Go-Jek doing supply acquisition at the time.

“In BPO, you’re currently paying manpower per day or per month, and not based on performance,” says Nugrahadi in a phone interview.

So they asked themselves, “Why not do a pay-per-performance model?” In Sampingan, freelancers get a payout based on the tasks they complete. The amount will be discussed between Sampingan and the customer before the task is taken on.

Sampingan earns  through commissions, which hover between 10 and 30 percent per task, depending on its complexity.

The company competes with other task-based marketplaces like Israel-based Fiverr and US-based UpWork. Closer to home, it’s battling the likes of Fastwork, which recently raised a US$4.8 million series A round led by China-based Gobi Partners.

Sampingan claims it differentiates itself by focusing only on specific tasks like supply acquisition, data collection, and sales, and building the expertise of its freelancers.

It also aims to offer a more enhanced product. The startup first launched its mobile app in November. With the fresh funding, Nugrahadi says they’re hiring software developers to make the app experience easier for their agents. They’re also working on integrating deep technologies like AI and machine learning to improve the platform’s matching capability.