Sequoia plays matchmaker: Go-Jek acquires 2 Indian startups for tech muscle

Indonesia’s fastest growing startup Go-Jek has acquired some Indian tech muscle in the form of two startups: C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition. With it, the bike taxi company has opened a technology center in Bangalore, its first overseas office. All the founding members of C42 and CodeIgnition are now part of Go-Jek’s tech leadership team.

The company is eyeing India’s enormous tech talent pool and aiming to “recruit 100 of the finest engineers, programmers, and data scientists – both junior and senior level – in the next 6 to 12 months,” Nadiem Makarim, founder and CEO of Go-Jek, tells Tech in Asia.

These are exceptional moves for a startup. They were prompted by the unusual predicament that Go-Jek found itself in.

The startup grew faster than anyone ever expected – not even its founder and investors. Chew this: it launched its mobile app in January 2015 and within a year, it had over 11 million downloads. And some 200,000 drivers.

With the enviable, rocket-fast growth in users came the enormous tech challenge of keeping pace. And there, the company stumbled. Drivers and passengers often complained about frozen bookings, rides that couldn’t be canceled, and “error” in the app. “Error” is Indonesian lingo for buggy and unreliable.

In short, the demand and usage were just too much for Go-Jek’s tech team to handle. “At Go-Jek, we grew so fast that we lost control of how many people downloaded our app. We grossly underestimated our growth rate,” Nadiem recalls.

That’s where its investor Sequoia Capital stepped in. The VC fund is big in India, so it did a bit of matchmaking. It connected Go-Jek to some tech ninjas in Bangalore and Delhi with C42 and CodeIgnition.

A marriage made in heaven

To Nadiem, it’s a marriage made in heaven. “We worked with them for a couple of months, loved their work so much. We felt these guys should be leading our technology operations as they are so good,” Nadiem says.

“These two startups helped us scale up our backend to match our growth in demand and users – pretty much helped us expand even more,” he says.

Founded in 2010 by Sidu Ponnappa, Niranjan Paranjape, and Aakash Dharmadhikari, C42 has been playing tech consultants for clients like Flipkart, Staples Labs, Quintype, UrbanLadder, and ThoughtWorks.

Experts at tech infrastructure automation, CodeIgnition was founded by Ajey Gore with Sumit Gupta, Shraddha Gore, Shobhit Srivastava, and Mehak Kahlon in 2013.

India, ahoy!