Product Search Engine Telunjuk Secures Funding from Japan’s Venture Republic in Bid to Win the Indonesian Market

Today, Indonesian price comparison site Telunjuk announced that it has received seed funding from Japan-based Venture Republic. The Telunjuk team says that Venture Republic’s experience in the shopping search engine business would help the team a lot in their effort to secure the top spot among product comparison search engines in Indonesia.

It is revealed that Telunjuk co-founders Redya Febriyanto and Hanindia Narendrata Rahiesa (Drata) still have the majority stake of the company. Together with Project Eden, Venture Republic will sit on Telunjuk’s executive board and help advise the startup.

Venture Republic notes that this is the VC’s first ever investment made in an Indonesian company. President and CEO Kei Shibata says that they jumped on-board after looking through the co-founders’ profiles as well as their company’s performance with a lean budget. Venture Republic itself has a few shopping search engine businesses in its Japanese portfolio such as Coneco, Travel.co.jp, and Hotel.jp.

Telunjuk now records half a million monthly unique visitors every month. Drata says that they will use the funds to expand marketing, develop more features, and hire more people while still keeping the team small. The team is squaring off against PriceArea which is backed by Japan-based GREE Ventures and Rocket Internet’s PricePanda.