Indonesian Startups – echelon 2010 edition
It is a well known fact that Indonesia has one of the highest internet penetration in the whole SE Asian region. With over 30 million users on the web, it comes as no surprise that they have a thriving and vibrant startup ecosystem. Few months back, we even reviewed two of the most popular startups in Indonesia, Kaskus and Koprol. Recently, Rama – the editor of DailySocial.net opined in his personal blog about the startup scene in Indonesia and has made some interesting points on the web landscape in large.
“Today, Indonesia has 21 million users on Facebook. That’s HUGE. Twitter is basically the same, we have a significant number of users on Twitter. In short, I can say that Indonesian people LOVE to stay connected with their friends via the internet. The basic culture of Indonesian people is to commune, have a good relationship with friends and even strangers. The internet facilitates this behavior, giving it more capability and also minimizing the cost for doing so.”
With social networking making a huge impact in this country, we see the likes of indigenous startups gaining user traction and that too at a very rapid pace. Yet, the most challenging bit for the startups in Indonesia is the investment and funding for startups. While relatively speaking, Singapore offers multitude of grants and schemes to the startup, there is a lack of serious seed stage funding and follow on investments.
“These entrepreneurs grow their business in an ecosystem where no one back them up, no VC, no governmental funding nothing, nada, zip! But they survived by bootstrapping (self-funding) their startups.” He also goes on to mention that, ”It’s been very confusing lately to see several Venture Capitalists come to Indonesia to start finding the next big thing here in our beloved country. Why? Because most of them are from Singapore. I met with 4 VC company so far, and another couple of VC companies i haven’t met but i know they exists. The funny thing is, 6 our of 8 of the VC companies i know are from Singapore.”
Tokopedia is one of the few startups that have managed to receive Series A funding. Incidentally, they will be exhibiting at echelon 2010. Rama ends with a note saying “If you’re an investor or work for a VC company and you haven’t seen this opportunity then I feel sorry for you, but I will gladly show you the power (and the money) of Indonesian startups.”
Rama will be coming down for echelon 2010 too. So if you are keen on knowing more about the vibrant technology landscape in Indonesia, you know what to do :) Here’s the list of some awesome Indonesian startups coming your way to Singapore.
2) BukuQ
3) KrazyMarket
4) Medresa
5) Koprol
6) Tokopedia
7) Urbanesia
[img courtest: rampok.net]
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