Indonesia’s YesBoss locks in seed funding round led by 500 Startups

YesBoss team

Indonesia’s on-demand virtual assistant startup YesBoss announced today it secured a “mid-six-figure” seed funding round led by 500 Startups. IMJ Investment Partners and Convergence Ventures participated in the round.

The company’s co-founder and CEO Irzan Raditya says the funding has come at the right time, considering YesBoss’s user base is oversubscribed and several strong competitors are cropping up in Jakarta.

“The demand for YesBoss was simply beyond our expectations, therefore, we had to make a queue so as to not compromise the quality of our service,” says Irzan. “With the funding, we can ramp up our capacity as well as invest into the product to deliver a consistently exceptional customer experience.”

YesBoss is an SMS-based service that gets someone to do errands for you. Whether you’re looking to purchase plane tickets, watch a movie, order food, or send flowers, YesBoss claims it can take care of it in a matter of minutes.

YesBoss arrived in Indonesia just months after US-based startup Magic went from a weekend project to a US$40 million valuation. Despite spurring debate and skepticism about whether a text-based virtual assistant can effectively scale, YesBoss has seen several competitors enter the on-demand service space. The two most likely contenders include HaloDiana, born from Ryan Gondokusomo of Sribu, and a little more indirectly Seekmi, the on-demand services provider built by Nayoko Wicaksono.

See: YesBoss is Indonesia’s answer to Magic, gets you anything you desire via SMS

As vital as electricity or the internet?

Addressing the competition that’s sure to heat up in Jakarta following the round, Convergence Ventures managing partner Adrian Li says, “In addition to the market potential, the YesBoss co-founders brought together experienced ecommerce operations and technical talent that makes a formidable team.”

YesBoss integrates with merchants and helps route orders directly to them. The team recently inked deals with brands like Foodpanda, NusaTrip, Black Garlic, Berry Kitchen, Qraved, and Lazada. YesBoss plans to onboard more partners following the capital injection.

Khailee Ng, managing partner of 500 Startups, is confident about the investment. He says, “We’re already seeing YesBoss as a daily standard in how middle-class Indonesians get through life, because everyone with some earning power wants a personal assistant to save them time and money. YesBoss will be as vital of a utility as electricity and internet which will make YesBoss as one of Indonesia’s most valuable companies very soon.”

Irzan tells Tech in Asia, “With Khailee Ng […] I got the chemistry right on the first phone call, he believes in our product vision and our capacity in execution. It was one phone call in the evening, the next day in the early morning he handed me the term sheet.”

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