Global investors flocked to EV Growth Annual Conference in Jakarta

Global investors flocked to EV Growth Annual Conference in Jakarta

Hotel Kempinski’s Ballroom overflowed with investors participating in EV Growth’s Annual Conference on 27th of June 2019 despite high tensions amidst the Indonesian presidential announcement. The event featured leading Indonesia growth and early-stage startups. Participants included startup founders, regional family offices, sovereign wealth funds, fund of funds and other esteemed guests. 

Mr. Abdullah Azwar Anas, head of regency Banyuwangi, made a surprise appearance to the event, in conjunction with his timely visit to Jakarta. He is well known in startup community and has been working closely with Ruangguru and Warung Pintar.

Launched in March last year, EV Growth is a joint venture between East Ventures, SMDV – the VC arm of Sinar Mas – and YJ Capital, the VC arm of Yahoo! Japan. The fund focuses on providing growth capital to leading startups in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia. The company is led by three partners – Willson Cuaca from East Ventures, Roderick Purwana from SMDV, and Shinichiro Hori from YJ Capital. 

The Annual Conference showcased a number of their portfolio startups from Indonesia, which is the geographical focus of the fund. The fund also released its 1st year fund performance. Five out of fifteen portfolios have already secured follow-on rounds, placing the fund’s 1-year IRR at double digits return.

Some of the event highlights include IDN Media fireside chat with Shinichiro Hori to discuss Indonesian millennial behavior. Winston Utomo, CEO of IDN Media, explained about the shift of media eyeballs to new media platforms such as e-sports

Batara Eto, Senior advisor to EV Growth, dug further the success of Sociolla’s first online-offline integrated store. John Marco Rasjid, CEO and Christopher Madiam, COO of Sociolla, explained how Sociolla’s online and offline integration helps their customers have better purchasing experience. Their upcoming flagship store is due to open in the month of August. 

Roderick Purwana took a deep dive into Warung Pintar’s asteroid growth mode, building physical tech-enabled kiosks throughout Indonesia. Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro, CEO of Warung Pintar, shared how the company has grown from 2 warungs to 1,000 within a year and expanded further to 2,500 within one and a half year since inception.

Yoshi Okubo, VP of Investment, discussed about Indonesia’s logistics landscape with Waresix’s CEO, Andree Susanto, and Waresix’s Co-founder, Edwin Wibowo. Andree and Edwin talked about their unique solution with its multi-modal approach to solving Indonesia’s “17,500 island logistic nightmare”.

Willson Cuaca then took the floor to discuss the progress of Ruangguru with its founders. Adamas Belva, CEO of Ruangguru, explained how the company has been amassing significant tractions, dominating Indonesia education market as the-app-to-go to enhance the student learning experience. Ruangguru has been rated 4.7 stars from thousands of users on Android store, outperforming other global education apps. Iman then shared the founders’ experience of managing their organization growing from 20 to 2,000 full-time employees today. 

Other EV Growth portfolio highlights include recently-announced Koinworks with its more than 300,000 retails investors, Moka that recently hit more than US$1 Billion annual GTV, Shopback that integrates cashback online and offline, CoHive that recently raised additional US$13.5 million, Traveloka that released its new Xperience product, and Tokopedia that recently hit their record US$1.3 Billion monthly GMV. 

The event also featured some highly potential early-stage startups such as Sirclo, Kedai Sayur, Fore Coffee, Aruna, The Fit company, Advotics, Stickearn and Nalagenetics. 

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