My curiosity was piqued by a Daily Social story on a new investor in Indonesa, Investidea. The firm already has three companies in its portfolio, and seems to have been flying under the radar for some time. One of its investments is in Kartumuu, a social greeting card platform, which is fairly well known and has been making the rounds at events like Dailysocial’s Sparxup awards for startups and East Ventures’ annual meetup in Jakarta.
If there’s one thing lacking in the Indonesia startup ecosystem, it’s investors. Last year, for example, the only fund that made active investments, that we know of, was East Ventures. That’s changing, with firms like GDP Venture and Nusantara Ventures increasing their profile and activity.
It’s always interesting when a new player arrives on the scene, so I got in touch with Charles Gandha, a partner at Investidea, to find out more. Gandha believes that Indonesia is on the cusp of a high-tech boom, and he thinks the biggest opportunity for investors is ‘social commerce’. Companies that can take advantage of Indonesians’ reliance on their mobile devices, while injecting a social layer on top of that, will be the winners, he thinks.
Tell us more about InvestIdea. What’s the fund size? The investment mandate?
Investidea is a technology incubator focused on helping Indonesia startups. Our typical investment is USD100,000 for each of the startups. Currently, we team up with Forte Capital in setting up a private equity/venture capital fund dedicated towards the TMT (Telecommunications, Media, and Technology) space for Indonesian market.
Tell us more about yourself and the other partners in the fund?
All of our partners are Indonesians who had experiences studying and working overseas in the high-tech sectors. While we went back to our country and start each of our own ventures few years back, now we are teaming together to explore the opportunities of high-tech venture capitalist in Indonesia.
InvestIdea seems to have closed three deals in a pretty short time. What was the rationale for each one?
Actually it is not in a short time, we have been progressing with the founders for quite sometimes but we have not make it public. We only share this information with our partners in the fund. The rationale for those investments is mostly due to their potential in Indonesia content consumption.
We try to balance our investment between tangible and intangible assets. For example, we invested in wireless hotzone provider which has the tangible asset and as a catalyst for our content products. Basically, we are interested in the startups that focus on consumer, internet, and mobile business models.
What’s your view of the Indonesia consumer internet and mobile scene?
It has huge potential, no doubt about it. In fact, all the indicators are here. Indonesia is the second largest market for Facebook after the US, and third for Twitter. The acquisition of a local web company, Koprol (location-based service), by Yahoo! has put Indonesia on a high-tech entrepreneurship foot print.
Shortly after that, in less than a year, Groupon has acquired disdus, a local daily deal startup. Ebay also has teamed up with Telkom Indonesia on an e-commerce portal, plasa.com. By next year, Multiply will be having a bigger office than the one in the USA located in Indonesia.
(Indonesia has a) huge population with rapid growing numbers of internet users. I remember giving my old laptop to my maid before she went back to her village and she then gave it to her teenage son. Soon after, the son added me as his friend on Facebook. Back there, the son has to cycle for about an hour to get to the closest internet cafe and now he is connected using mobile internet devices. Now he becomes that facilitator. Every single day in Indonesia, that ‘instant facilitator’ aspect is blooming here and there, wherever there is a cellphone signal reception to connect via GPRS or EV-DO.
What are the big trends and opportunities in the market?
The biggest trend and opportunity in Indonesia, in our opinion, is something we identify as social commerce. People here intend to be glued to their mobile device. I’d like to put it in terms of, ‘making distant people closer and making close people distant’. That is what happened when we are glued to our mobile gadgets all the time. Being a geographically distant country, we also would like our startups to become the ‘social bridge’ and yet not make people anti-social. Those ‘social bridges’ in turn will be the catalysts and key players for the new era of ‘cybernomics’ in our country.
Anything else you’d like to add.
Now is Asia’s time, it’s time for Asia to shine and I believe Indonesia is playing a big role on that one. Respect!
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