UrbanIndo, the Indonesian online real estate marketplace, is the latest startup to slip into the East Ventures’ investment portfolio. This round of funding also sees Chandra Tjan of East Ventures joining UrbanIndo’s board of directors.
The site was launched on November 2011 and has seen decent growth ever since. In six months, it now generates over 100,000 visitors and has over 10,000 real estate listings. Arip Tirta, CEO of UrbanIndo, said in a statement:
What we are doing is unprecedented amongst online property sites in Indonesia. We are trying to modernize how Indonesians look for property. We are really big in analyzing the data that we have to help our users find, sell, or rent their property in the best way possible.
UrbanIndo faces some tough competitors who include rumah123.com, rumah.com, rumahdanproperti.com, rumahku.com, and kolomrumah.com. It also competes with forum-based and listings sites like Kaskus and Tokobagus which both have property listing sections.
The team right now has a total of five people and is based out at Bandung, Indonesia. Interestingly, co-founder Arip Tirta was the former director of investment analyst and strategy at Hercules Technology Growth Capital (HTGC), a US$1.0 billion investment firm in Silicon Valley. He shared with us more on his experience and credentials:
For seven years at HTGC, I was instrumental in completing investments worth more than $2 billion in about 150 technology companies in the US. I received a bachelor of science in mathematics of computation from UCLA, and a master of science in scientific computing and computational mathematics from Stanford University.
I look forward to seeing how UrbanIndo pans out, especially since it is founded by an investor-turned-entrepreneur.
Disclosre: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for further details
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