A profitable, fast-growing Indonesian startup is powering chat on popular apps

As tech startups and enterprises jump on a trend of building out chat services on their platform to increase user engagement, a company that comes from a small Indonesian city called Yogyakarta is well-poised to benefit.

Qiscus makes a software development kit (SDK) that enables developers to integrate chat and messaging features into their apps.

Delta Purna Widyangga, CEO of Qiscus / Photo credit: Qiscus

One of its SDK’s features is integration with a chatbot. In fact, Qiscus has a close relationship with Kata.ai, a prominent Jakarta-based chatbot developer. While the startups don’t have an exclusivity agreement, Kata.ai will by default offer Qiscus’ Chat SDK to its clients as a platform to build the chat service.

To date, Qiscus has only raised around US$900,000 across three rounds of funding, but it’s already profitable. It counts Telkom-backed MDI Ventures, Singapore-based Rekanext, and Indonesia-based Prasetia Dwidharma among its investors.

Pivot over pivot

Qiscus was originally established in 2013 by four co-founders: Delta Purna Widyangga, Amin Nordin, Evan Purnama, and Muhammad Md Rahim. The quartet started off by building Phidecks, a chat app designed to help schools facilitate in-class and remote discussions. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find a client who was willing to put money on the table.

However, an idea emerged as they built Phidecks. While the team members ran around to attend different meetings in different countries, they had trouble communicating with one another. That experience prompted them to modify their product and position themselves as a workplace messaging app instead. Qiscus was born, and Nordin took charge as the CEO of the company.

The name Qiscus itself comes from the word “discuss” with a flipped letter “d.” “We want to say that our product is beyond just a usual discussion,” says Widyangga, who had an earlier stint as an IT consultant at Accenture.

2016 proved to be a challenging year for Qiscus: Nordin stepped down for personal reasons, and Widyangga took on the CEO role.

The remaining founders also felt that even though the business already had hundreds of clients three years in, its growth still wasn’t meeting expectations. That’s when they found a promising blue ocean sector that they could tap, thanks to feedback from clients like wedding marketplace Bridestory, payment gateway Doku, and healthtech platform Halodoc.

While several clients said they liked Qiscus’ mission, they also expressed the need for something more. “Bridestory needed a chat solution for their consultation service, Doku wanted a chat solution that can facilitate money transactions, and Halodoc wished for a reliable chat solution for its main service, doctor-patient online consultation,” explains Widyangga.

Armed with this information, the fledgling business made a difficult change. Qiscus’ founders gathered their entire team to announce that the workplace messaging app they’ve been developing for the last three years would be scrapped and then repackaged into a chat SDK. They also mentioned that the company needed additional funding to pursue the new plan.

Widyangga recalls that it was a hard moment for him.

“We realized that if we didn’t communicate it well, it could have been a painful experience that could cause the company to crumble. Developers were disappointed to see their “baby” was being scrapped, but fortunately, we convinced all of them to stay. That moment taught us to be very transparent about the company’s condition, and that’s something we’ve kept up until now.”

Plans for expansion