Sampingan Announces Series A Funding of 71 Billion Rupiah

Sampingan announces the closing of $5 million Series A funding or equivalent to 71 billion Rupiah. This round was led by Altara Ventures, with the participation of Access Ventures, XA Network, iSeed SEA, and two investors in the previous round, Golden Gate Ventures and Antler. Currently, the startup founded by Wisnu Nugrahadi, Margana Mohamad, and Dimas Pramudya has managed to raise up to $7.1 million in funds.

Fresh funds will be focused on strengthening the technology, product, and sales teams. Since their launch in 2019, they have served around 150 corporate clients with 850 thousand workers. Its services allow business partners to connect with blue-collar workers to perform various types of work, such as making sales, creating product reviews, conducting surveys, installing applications, etc.

In Indonesia, there are several platforms that specifically target blue-collar workers (informal workers). In general, it consists of two forms. First, there is a job marketplace that allows companies to recruit prospective workers with a more formal recruitment process. While agency services usually provide certain jobs on the platform, registered workers can take on and do the task directly, and get a commission after successful submission.

The presence of these services is based on a fairly large niche market. Based on BPS data in 2019, these workers dominate the informal sector with a rate of 57.27%. Sampingan's internal data also recorded an increase during the pandemic. From March to December 2020, the number of Sampingan applications downloads exceeding 1 million, increased by 4 times. The number of partners also increased significantly during this period, without announcing a detailed number.

Previously, in an interview with DailySocial, the founders said that Sampingan was inspired by an outsourcing business model that applies daily or monthly targets to workers. In the process, Sampingan uses a similar approach to that model, providing pay based on performance results (pay per performance).

Sampingan was started as Antler startup generator's first batch program in Singapore. In 2020, the program finally arrived in Indonesia to provide mentorship and investment programs to prospective founders. Apart from Sampingan, there are also local startups generated from this program, including Bubays and Cooklab.

– Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian