Indonesia’s new stock-trading app gets SoftBank backing

A new app that wants to help ordinary Indonesians invest in the stock market just got a boost from a big-name investor.

Ajaib, which launches this weekend after four months of testing, has pocketed US$2.1 million in a round led by SoftBank Ventures, the team tells Tech in Asia.

Photo credit: Pexels

When TIA talked to Ajaib over the summer, the founders had just graduated from Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator and rolled out the investing service quietly in test mode via an Android app.

In the interim, the Jakarta-based crew has grown to 14 employees and secured a mutual fund brokerage license from Indonesia’s regulators.

There’s a waiting list of 5,000 people to join the stock-trading app this weekend.

Time to grow

With only 1 million of Indonesia’s 260 million people investing their cash into stocks, Ajaib CEO Anderson Sumarli sees huge scope for growth, especially now that the country’s consumers are using digital services on their phones for things like ride-hailing. Next, they’ll be ready for new financial services on their phones, beyond the cashless payments and online loans that they’re pretty familiar with.

Yada Piyajomkwan, the startup’s CMO, concurs, saying that “2019 will be about wealth management.”

Photo credit: Ajaib

Sumarli is from Indonesia and was previously a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group. Piyajomkwan, from Thailand, is an ex-McKinsey consultant who has specialized in financial inclusion at Stanford University as well as in her counsel to her country’s central bank. The duo ran into each other at Stanford.

To grow the app, the Ajaib team is looking to go viral.

“We’ll encourage existing customers to refer their friends, and this will be them giving advice to their friends on investing for the first time, together with some money to start investing with,” says Piyajomkwan. “And the second thing: we want to encourage our customers who are our loyal users to talk about us on social media – to become, basically, champions of the product.”

Those cheerleaders will get rewards.

15 bucks for starters