Indonesian blue-collar workforce platform Sampingan lands $5m in Altara-led round

Indonesian workforce platform Sampingan announced it has closed a US$5 million series A funding round led by Altara Ventures.

The Sampingan team

Other investors including Golden Gate Ventures, Antler, Access Ventures, XA Network, and iSeed SEA also participated in the financing round. Sampingan has raised US$7.1 million in total to date.

The funding from the financing round will be allocated toward the expansion of the company’s tech, product, and sales teams.

Founded in 2018, Sampingan – which translates to “side job” – aims to formalize the blue-collar workforce in Indonesia by providing a platform that makes it easier for companies to find and manage their workers, while providing equal opportunities for them in the country.

The Jakarta-based startup claims to serve over 150 clients including large and small enterprises with a suite of three core offerings: Sampingan Manpower, Sampingan Solutions, and Sampingan Systems. Currently, the company partners with more than 850,000 temporary and permanent workers.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated the need for a workforce solution like Sampingan. The company claims to have observed a substantial increase in the number of partners that joined from March to December 2020. The tech firm also said its number of downloads for the mobile application has grown by 4x since the pandemic began, exceeding 1 million downloads in 2020.

Sampingan’s offerings provide companies with various services including field force management, crowdsourcing, and market research. It also handles a software-as-a-service suite that helps companies monitor their workforces through performance trackers.

In September 2019, the company raised US$1.5 million in a round led by Golden Gate Ventures. Prior to this, it raised US$600,000 in a pre-seed round in 2018 as part of Antler’s first Singapore cohort.