Indonesian virtual assistant YesBoss acquires Philippine startup

YesBoss team

Indonesian virtual assistant service YesBoss announced today that it has acquired HeyKuya, a Philippines-based startup, for an undisclosed amount. With this move, YesBoss has started regional expansion.

HeyKuya is also a virtual personal assistant. Started in October last year, out of the Philippine company builder Machine Ventures. it’s run by a team of ten. All employees will continue to work under the YesBoss Group, with HeyKuya founder Shahab Shabibi acting as managing director of YesBoss Philippines.

HeyKuya provides services very similar to those of YesBoss, ranging from food delivery to travel booking via SMS. It claimed to handle more than 500 requests per day from 15,000 customers at the time of the acquisition.

The newly acquired startup is likely to keep the name HeyKuya for now, but YesBoss’ tech will operate in the background. HeyKuya will also be revamped to match YesBoss’ corporate identity.

“Since February, we’ve been transferring our tech and product, from backend, frontend, to dashboard, and the result is fantastic,” says Irzan Raditya, co-founder and CEO of YesBoss. “With our tech HeyKuya is able to scale its service to serve more and more customers.”

Next, YesBoss plans to roll out its mobile app in both countries. It’s currently being tested in Indonesia in a private trial.

Irzan has plenty of good reasons for choosing the Philippines as a starting point for expansion.

“The Philippine market is quite similar to the Indonesian market with its uniqueness and challenges, there is no significant competitor yet, and it’s a perfect market when it comes to customer service. It’s the new India for customer service – a good starting point for our future expansion when we can centralize most of the operations there,” he explains.

YesBoss was founded in May 2015. Its seed round was backed by 500 Startups, Convergence Ventures, and IMJ Investment partners. The startup is currently in the middle of raising a new round of funding.

See: YesBoss is Indonesia’s answer to Magic, gets you anything you desire via SMS