Alpha JWC, Gojek’s VC arm pour $35m into Indonesian agritech firm

AgriAku, an Indonesia-based agritech firm, has raised US$35 million in a series A funding round led by Alpha JWC Ventures, with participation from Gojek investment arm Go-Ventures.

The VC funds of three of the country’s largest state-owned enterprises – MDI Ventures, BRI Ventures, and Mandiri Capital Indonesia – also joined the funding round, making AgriAku the only agritech company to receive funding from those firms.

AgriAku team / Photo credit: AgriAku

Founded in May last year, AgriAku is a B2B marketplace that connects retailers of farming equipment – known locally as toko tani – with suppliers of agricultural input such as seeds, fertilizers, and agrochemicals. It gets revenue from the margin for every transaction that happens.

The company currently has more than 20,000 retailers on its platform who are mostly located in Java Island, Lampung, and South Sulawesi.

AgriAku was established by serial entrepreneur Irvan Kolonas and Airy co-founder Danny Handoko. It currently has hundreds of employees, most of whom are operational teams on the field.

It recently hired two C-level executives: former Traveloka executive Abraham Soedjito as chief strategy officer and former Tokopedia executive Valmik Mirani as chief commercial officer.

The agritech firm plans to use the fresh funding to optimize its unit economics, expand revenue streams, and hire more employees for its product and tech teams.

See also: The key players in Indonesia’s promising agritech space

Kolonas told Tech in Asia that the bigger vision of AgriAku is to digitize the local agriculture sector, especially farmers. “However, it will be hard to directly change farmers’ behavior as most of them don’t use smartphones,” he said.

That’s why the startup began by helping retailers and suppliers of agricultural input, and it aims to provide them with more services such as data, logistics, and financing. It also plans to strengthen market penetration by helping farmers sell their harvest to toko tani and other potential buyers.

Other investors in the funding round include:

• Gentree Fund
• K3 Ventures
• Thai Wah Public Company
• Alto Partners
• InnoVen Capital
• Mercy Corps Social Venture Funds