Traveloka May Have Acquired Rival Pegipegi Early This Year

On January 2018, Japan's Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Pegipegi (Indonesia), Mytour (Vietnam), and TravelBook (Philippines) have divested the companies to Jet Tech Innovation Ventures Pte Ltd (Jet Tech), a Singapore-based shell company. Later we understand that Jet Tech may relate to Traveloka, Southeast Asia's leading OTA startup.

Recruit Holdings decided to sell its online travel business because of the competitive market of OTA business in the region. It refocuses into its core business, maintaining SaaS HR product. The company recently acquired US-based leading job-related portal Glassdoor.

According to Recruit Holdings' Notification of Change, the three companies are sold for $66.8 million (more than 900 billion Rupiah). Hendrik Susanto is listed as Jet Tech's Director. This is the first clue that lead to relation between Jet Tech and Traveloka.

Susanto is currently served as Traveloka's Chief Strategy and Investment Officer. Before joining Traveloka in September 2017, he was in the investment management industry for more than 20 years. His last position was the CEO of Ancora Capital Management.

Jet Tech was founded in the mid 2017. It's not a surprise we figure out that Jet Tech and Traveloka Pte Ltd's registered address in Singapore are located at the same address.

A little investigation in LinkedIn reveals that "employees" of Jet Tech include Kevin Sandjaja and Serlina Wijaya. Both are now leading Pegipegi as CEO and Head of Marketing respectively. Previously they're working for Traveloka, Sandjaja as Product Manager, while Wijaya was in Marketing and Analytics.

In Mytour Vietnam, we found out at least two Traveloka employees currently helping the team. One is leading the Marketing department, while the other serves as Tech Advisor.

As the leading OTA platform in the region, Traveloka has been available in 6 Southeast Asian countries. The company is said to be looking to raise $400 million funding from Singapore's GIC with $4 billion valuation.

Recently, company's former CTO and co-founder, Derianto Kusuma, has decided to left the company to build new non-competing business.

According to DailySocial's OTA survey (2018), Traveloka is the most popular OTA service in Indonesia, while Pegipegi is the 3rd most popular. Pegipegi's net sales in 2016 reached more than 424 billion Rupiah.