Kevin Aluwi and Some VCs Participate in GoTrade's Seed Funding

Last Friday (6/25) Singapore-based equity investment platform Gotrade announced a $7 million seed funding led by LocalGlobe. In this round, Gojek's Co-Founder & CEO, Kevin Aluwi participated as an angel investor.

Some local venture capitalists were involved, including Amand Ventures, Prasetia Dwidharma, and Brama One Ventures. Also, a Surabaya-based venture capitalist who has invested in a number of startups, including Ayoconnect, Halodoc, NalaGenetics, and others.

Gotrade offers a seamless experience of trading from the United States stock exchange. Currently, this service has been accessible for users in Indonesia on a limited basis. Since its launch, until now, it's still using the invitation model for new users.

The model requires potential users to first get an invitation from the previous user. It is due to the early stage of the application. Gotrade's statistic have shown more than 100 thousand users 13 weeks since the application's launch.

This startup was founded in 2019 by David Grant, Norman Wanto, and Rohit Mulani. They are currently participating in the Y Combinator accelerator program [YC being one of the initial investors].

One of the value propositions Gotrade offers is to break down geographic restrictions for investments, by not charging commissions and removing the minimum deposit size. Users from 150 countries can buy fractional shares in the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ starting at $1.

Investment platforms or wealthtech are getting quite popular in Indonesia, along with increasing young people (millennials and Gen Z) interest to start investing. Several local startups developing related services received lots of support from investors. For example, Ajaib just completed the series A funding round last March 2021 with a total value of 1.3 trillion Rupiah. It is after Sequoia's announcement of IDR 938 billion additional funding in May 2021.

Apart from that, there are many other platforms offering investment services with various instruments. Those that also provide access to the US stock exchange are Pluang – limited to the S&P 500; they are also supported by Go-Ventures as investors and currently integrated in the Gojek service ecosystem.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian