POS Startup Olsera Bags 35.8 Billion Rupiah Seed Funding from Kejora-SBI Orbit Fund

The Point-of-sales (POS) platform, Olsera, announced a seed funding today (1/7) worth of $2.5 million or equivalent to 35.8 billion Rupiah from Kejora-SBI Orbit Fund -- a joint managed fund between Kejora Capital (Indonesia) and SBI Holdings (Japan).

Using this fresh fund, Olsera will continue to strengthen its technology infrastructure, recruit more talent, and help digitize the MSME business players in more than 200 other cities in Indonesia.

Founded in 2014, Olsera is said to have served more than 10,000 MSMEs in 300 cities in Indonesia to digitize their business. The Olser's POS solution is not only limited to recording transactions, users are also assisted with ERP features which include inventory management, accounting, marketing, personnel, services, and other functions.

"As fellow entrepreneurs, we understand very well that building and maintaining a business in this current situation is not an easy matter. Since 2015, we ourselves have continued to learn and focus on one thing, how Olsera can help other entrepreneurs to grow bigger by implementing technology to simplify business management," Olsera's Co-founder & CEO, Novendy Chen said.

Product variants as value proposition

In terms of developing POS services, Olsera directly competes with many players. Some of those are Moka, Qasir, majoo, Pawoon, Youtap, iSeller, and several others. Therefore, it is important for each player to focus on emphasizing its value proposition.

For Olsera, product innovation is the key to providing added value to its users. In 2020, the company launched the Zenwel service to make it easier for business players in the service sector to manage online reservations. Recently, they introduced the Olsera Store e-commerce enabler to help MSMEs manage online sales.

"During the pandemic, we observe some MSMEs are negatively affected by sales as they're doing offline businesses. We launched Olsera Store for offline businesses can shift into online, therefore, they can continue run the business," Olsera's Co-founder & CTO, Ali Tjin said.

Ali continued, "At the same time, business players in the service sector suffer losses related to the implementation of social distancing. We wanted to help them, in order for Zenwel to grow. Specifically designed for the service business, Zenwel is equipped with calendar scheduling features, online reservations, CRM and loyalty programs to support their customer acquisition and retention."

Tight competition in POS market

The global POS market size has reached $10.39 billion in 2021, projected to grow 9.5% from 2021 to 2028. This is indeed a very large market. In Indonesia alone, MSME ecosystem channels quite a big potential and becomes an important component in the national economy.

Kemenkop UKM data shows that around 64.2 million MSMEs have contributed to the country's economy by 61.07 percent or Rp. 8,573.89 trillion. The government has set an ambitious target to bring 30 million MSMEs into the digital economy by 2024. As of September 2021, the Indonesian E-Commerce Association (idEA) recorder around 16.4 million (25%) had entered the digital ecosystem; almost doubled during the pandemic.

This potential encourages innovators to present the most relevant POS services, especially in the MSME segment. In our observation, some POS players have also received support from investors, even two of them have exited through acquisitions and IPOs, below is the list: