InvestIdea Talks About Investing in Great Ideas

The rise of Indonesian start-ups is coupled with the rise of venture capitalists in the country. We have seen East Ventures invest in potential start-ups and we also saw CyberAgent Ventures invested in Indonesia’s Tokopedia. There are even more jumping on the Indonesian venture capital bandwagon, namely Nusantara Ventures and InvestIdea.

InvestIdea recently announced its investment in KartuMuu and Bistip. That caught our interest and we managed to grab hold of Charles Gandha, one of the partners at InvestIdea to find out more:

1. Who is the founder of InvestIdea and how big is your team?

All of our partners are Indonesians who had experience studying and working overseas in the high-tech sectors. When we returned to Indonesia, we each started our own ventures before getting together to explore the opportunities of high-tech venture capital in Indonesia. We’re also partnering with Forte Capital in setting up PE & VC funds dedicated towards the TMT (Telecommunications, Media, and Technology) space in the Indonesian market.

2. Can you explain a little bit more about InvestIdea?  What is your plan for Indonesia?

InvestIdea is a technology incubator focusing on helping young Indonesian entrepreneurs to develop their cool ideas into real venture businesses.  Our goal is to get new tech start-ups going through the initial phase to become serious businesses. Most of the time it means ‘get them to the point where they have built something impressive enough to convince their communities’. The communities we are talking about also include the next round of investors on a larger scale.

We achieve our goal using a set of specific strategies from the experiences of our founders, which follow through from the birth of the idea, proof of concept modeling, until [it’s a] legitimate working entity. According to our motto ‘accelerating the next tech stars’, the methodologies indeed speed up the ventures that we support to accomplish what they are right now.

3. At which stage does InvestIdea plan to play? Seed-funding?

Unfortunately, we can only play in the seeding period at the moment, up to the point where startup ecosystems in Indonesia reach their maturity. The situation in the Indonesia tech sector right now is kind of similar with Silicon Valley in the pre-millennium era, when the rule of thumb is first come first gain.

We currently provide seed-funding, strategic & legal counseling, operational guidance, and infrastructure support for our startup ventures to help them transit into high-growth technology businesses.

Our bigger plan is also to play a role in the next corporate capitalizing stages, which are growth and buyout, once the support systems in Indonesia are ready. Until then, we will actively contributing to shape Indonesian high-tech industry into the best possible business model.