Indonesian AI startup goes global

Welcome to The Signal, a monthly newsletter about how Asia’s scrappiest companies get more done with less. We go behind the scenes with the builders rethinking how people, tools, and information work together, and explore the connected infrastructure making smarter ways of working possible.

---

Dear reader,

Tech in Asia is launching a new newsletter called The Signal. It’s about the future of connected work and how companies rethink the nuts and bolts of their operations.

Every month for the upcoming year, we’ll sit down with a tech operator from Indonesia who is doing interesting work in an interesting way.

The main point is, we want you to walk away with lessons you can implement in your own team. Think of it as stealing notes from someone smart!

Speaking of notes, this month, we’ll kick off the series with a local AI note-taking assistant built for a global audience and a founder who’s discovered the hard way what going global costs in servers and bandwidth.

But even when running into these issues, he’s making a bet that a local startup can compete with global players with bigger funding – AI note-taking app Granola, for one, raised US$125 million in March.

The first person needing to be convinced? Yours truly.

I’m quite old school when it comes to note-taking. I still rely on my trusted pen and notebook. To be honest, I’m a bit skeptical about automated notes. If I couldn’t be bothered to write it down myself, would I even be bothered to review it?

But seeing figures on the adoption of AI meeting assistants nudges me to reconsider my stance. Otter.ai, for example, has over 35 million users. It has processed more than 1 billion meetings by the end of 2025, according to the company’s report.

Have I been missing out on improved productivity that millions of others have found?

These meeting assistants are now a much sought-after product that, as a builder, you stand a chance at carving your own spot in the global market as a company based in Indonesia. That’s the story of Meeting.ai.

Tech in Asia speaks with the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Hokiman Kurniawan, about a viral moment that overrode his server’s capacity, what it takes to keep an AI product feeling instant wherever in the world it’s used, and why his entire team has stayed in Indonesia while serving customers worldwide.

---

How Meeting.ai learned to build for the world

---

On our radar

---