Go-Jek reveals first close of new funding round, crucial stats

Indonesian ride-hailing behemoth Go-Jek has announced the close of the initial chunk of its ongoing series F round, led by existing investors Google, JD, and Tencent.

The firm didn’t disclose any deal figures, but it’s reportedly raising up to US$2 billion. Bloomberg reported that it raised more than US$1 billion for this round so far.

When completed, the round will value the business at roughly US$9.5 billion, an earlier TechCrunch report said, citing sources.

Go-Jek today divulged new stats on its traction. Here’s the lowdown:

• Annualized 2 billion transaction volume in 2018
• More than US$9 billion in annualized gross transaction value (GTV) across all markets
• US$6.3 billion GTV handled by Go-Pay, and US$2 billion processed by Go-Food
• Now present in five countries, claims to hold a 40 percent market share in Vietnam
• Go-Jek and affiliates’ network: 2 million driver-partners, 400,000 merchants, 1.5 million agents, 600,000 providers
• More than 130 million downloads for Go-Jek and its ecosystem of apps

In contrast, here are archrival Grab’s publicly available stats:

• US$1 billion revenue in 2018
• 3 billion rides completed as of January 2019
• Present in eight countries, claims to command 62 percent of Indonesian market
• 9 million driver-partners, merchants, and agents
• More than 130 million app downloads

We reached out to analytics firm App Annie for its own set of downloads data, and this is what we got (for both iOs and Google Play):

• Go-Jek: More than 57 million
• Grab: More than 139 million

An App Annie spokesperson clarifies that their data pertains only to the Go-Jek app and that the team can’t disclose data for Go-Jek’s other apps.

The spokesperson adds, “We obviously don’t have visibility or access to their internal data.”

We’ve reached out to Go-Jek for comment. We also asked the firm to clarify the difference between GTV and the usual industry metric – gross merchandise volume.

In terms of bookings, a recent study claims that almost 30 percent of orders on Go-Jek’s app in home base Indonesia may be fraudulent. The same study pegs the figure for Grab at 5 percent.

However, Grab claims to have brought down fraud rates in the country to under one percent, and notes that “having a fraud-free platform means our GMV is cleaner.” Go-Jek has yet to comment on the results of the study.

Growing regional footprint