Fresh out of Y Combinator, Indonesian startup launches investing app

Photo credit: Sam Valadi

Just over a million of Indonesia’s 261 million population have a portfolio of shares. That’s only 0.4 percent.

And that’s exactly why a company fresh out of startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) wants to get in early on what promises to be a booming market as Indonesia’s middle class grows.

Anderson Sumarli, Yada Piyajomkwan, and Kevin Lee are the founders of Ajaib who today graduated from the latest Y Combinator batch in Silicon Valley. They’re the only team from Southeast Asia in this cohort.

“We’re going back to Jakarta,” Sumarli told me during a call just before the YC demo day. The app launches today in Indonesia, so the trio needs to return to base and listen to feedback from its early adopters.

Guided trading

Sumarli, who serves as CEO, says that Ajaib is somewhat different from Robinhood – the US-based stock-trading app valued at over US$5 billion – in that it focuses on financial inclusion.

“What we learned is that there are a lot of Indonesians that just had enough savings, because of the rising middle class, and they’re thinking about investing but really have no idea how to do it. They also don’t know who to ask for advice, because neither their parents nor friends invest,” explains Sumarli.

He adds, “So we are taking more of a guided approach. We’re actually recommending to customers what the right portfolio is, then we auto-manage their portfolio.”

L-R: Yada Piyajomkwan, Anderson Sumarli, Kevin Lee, pictured after the YC demo day / Photo credit: Ajaib

The app learns about new users from a brief questionnaire, and then it concocts what Sumarli calls a “personalized portfolio” based on the responses. If users like what they see, they can transfer money into the account. “They can start investing right there, right then,” says the CEO.

See: The state of fintech in Indonesia

Three simple settings – from “moderate” to “aggressive” – allow users to manage how risky they’d like the investment strategy to be.

The guidance given to its newbie investors comes from a mix of AI and human expertise – including outside help from one of Indonesia’s top fund managers.

Three become one

Starting point