From Social Commerce to Online Grocery, Pasarnow Scored 47 Billion Rupiah Seed Funding

Starting from a social commerce platform, startup Jamannow has established the online grocery service "Pasarnow". This business model shifting (pivot) was welcomed by investors with the announcement of a seed funding of $3.3 million or equivalent to 47 billion Rupiah. This round was led by East Ventures with the participation of SMDV, Skystar Capital, Amand Ventures, Prasetia Dwidharma, and several angel investors.

The startup was founded in 2019 by James Rijanto, Donald Wono, and Cindy Ozzie. Its currently focus on simplifying the supply chain in the fresh grocery sector and offering quality fresh food products to customers through a multi-channel platform. The multi-channel approach allows them to embrace the B2B and B2C sectors at the same time. Each channel offers different prices, promotions, and key features to meet specific customer needs.

"Ensuring the freshness of products when they arrive at customers is a big challenge for businesses in the fresh food sector. Food products such as fruits, vegetables, and frozen meats are perishable, therefore, requiring fast delivery with well-controlled temperatures, and ultimately causing high logistics costs," Pasarnow's Co-founder & CEO, James Rijanto said.

"That's why Pasarnow is investing heavily in technology and operational infrastructure to solve this problem. Moreover, Pasarnow's multi-channel platform helps us achieve faster economies of scale and create greater efficiencies in our operations," he added.

In the process, the operating system on the backend collects order history to generate market demand predictions, therefore, more than 1,000 partner farmers and suppliers can better plan and optimize their harvest schedules. That way, they can offer customers high quality and fresh ingredients at the best prices and minimize the amount of wasted fresh ingredients.

Currently, Pasarnow operates in Greater Jakarta and Bandung with more than 100 employees and 200 daily workers and driver partners.

Pasarnow will use the fresh funds to expand into new cities, recruit talent, improve its data and technology infrastructure and build micro warehouses, Frontline Mini Hubs (FMH). In order to complement the 10 hubs that are currently availbale across Jabodetabek, FMH will be built in densely populated areas and equipped with special storage devices for fresh and frozen foodstuffs.

Online grocery investment keeps pouring

On the same day (07/9), another online grocery startup, Segari, also announced funding in the Series A round, led by a venture arm owned by Gojek. This adds to the long list of startups in related fields receiving funding since the pandemic. Based on DailySocial.id's data, since Q2 2020 [the early period of the pandemic] until now, there have been 10 investments, including:

"Changes in consumer shopping behavior due to the pandemic pose new challenges in the grocery industry. Customers demand fresh and high-quality products every day amid complex grocery supply chains. Pasarnow is here to address these challenges by eliminating inefficiencies through a data-driven business model. With heavy growth since last year, we believe that the Pasarnow team can accelerate their operational capacity building and business development," East Ventures' Managing Partner, Willson Cuaca said.

It is said that the retail market value of foodstuffs in Indonesia was estimated to have reached $108 billion in 2019, but online grocery only contributed less than 1%. Under current conditions, the size of the online grocery market is expected to increase by around $13 billion by 2025.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian