Majoo, an Indonesia-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider said Monday it has received $4 million pre-series A funding led by AC Ventures with participation from BRI Ventures and Xendit.
With its new funding, Majoo will accelerate its instant online store’s product development and market penetration for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), Majoo said in a statement.
“MSMEs are very dependent on offline sales activities. Looking at the pandemic situation, we developed eCommerce features in a mission to support MSME to pull through this challenging time. We provide them with a tool to create their own website, online payments, and integration with Grabfood, Tokopedia, Shopee, and other e-commerce services,” said Adi W Rahadi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Majoo.
According to Majoo, e-commerce has seen tremendous growth over the past five years and is expected to continue this trajectory to a $57 billion market by 2025. The next phase of growth of e-commerce will be driven by converting the offline-ultra traditional businesses online.
Majoo intends to grow alongside the MSMEs that it supports and will come out with updated features to provide entrepreneurs of different backgrounds with the most convenient ways to run their businesses and bring them to the next level.
MSMEs form the backbone of Indonesia’s economy, with more than 60 million registered enterprises contributing to more than 67 percent of the gross domestic product and employing 90 percent of the adult workforce in the country. Earlier in the year, President Joko Widodo strengthened the government’s focus to support the digitization of MSMEs, stating that the government is “eyeing the expansion of digital transformations for millions of MSMEs in Indonesia.” When the pandemic hit in 2020, MSMEs are estimated to have lost 70 percent of their total sales from the impact of lockdowns. This accelerated the need for business owners to find solutions to survive and continue growing.
Starting off as a Point of Sales solution for MSMEs, Majoo is expanding its offerings to be the “end to end SaaS for Indonesian MSME” to sell through multiple offline and online channels with a single dashboard. With strong partnerships, integrations to multiple marketplaces, and a deep relationship with different MSME associations, Majoo is able to develop a platform that uniquely caters to Indonesian businesses.
The Majoo app has grown 85 percent year on year to acquire over 20,000 active merchants with best-in-market 12-month retention, demonstrating its products’ quality and market fit. Presently, Majoo has processed over 80 million transactions worth $600 million for MSMEs in more than 600 cities in Indonesia across a diverse range of businesses from food and beverage to laundromats and convenience stores. The eCommerce features that have been recently launched also demonstrated strong early traction as Majoo plans to accelerate its development with additional funding.
Majoo was founded by Adi W Rahadi and Audia R Harahap, professionals with over 30 years of combined experience within the MSME space. Adi was previously head of T-Cash (now LinkAja), where he faced the numerous challenges that smaller businesses face. Audia previously ran multiple MSMEs, which gave him firsthand experience of the pain points faced in the sector. Through these experiences, the founders have found a common conviction to build Majoo to address the difficulties for MSME businesses.
“AC Ventures (ACV) has long recognized the incredible potential for digitizing the MSME economy in Indonesia, and the pandemic has accelerated technology adoption by this sector by 3 to 5 years. Adi and Audia’s background and experience perfectly match their mission to bring growth and productivity empowering technologies to the millions of small business owners across Indonesia. We’re excited and proud to be investing with them to create a massive impact to this sector and the economy,” said Adrian Li, Founder and Managing Partner of AC Ventures.
Another challenge for MSMEs is financial record management, which has become a major hurdle for them to gain access to working capital. For this reason, Majoo digitizes the financial reporting process for MSMEs, generating reliable financial information that can be used for loan application processes. Majoo has partnered with several financing partners, a major one being BRI, to streamline further the process for users to access capital.
“With the same spirit to empower MSMEs and giving access to capital, we see there’s numerous potential synergy that we can do together with the BRI Group ecosystem and subsidiaries. For instance, providing the MSMEs access to digital saving, digital loan and buy now pay later services from Bank Raya (previously BRI Agro). When the MSMEs access to capital problem is solved with the help of Majoo, we believe they could upgrade their business and move to the next level” said Nicko Widjaja, Chief Executive Officer of BRI Ventures.
With the mission to empower MSMEs in Indonesia, Majoo will continue to add more features to its platform to further support MSMEs to grow their business. Majoo also aspires to expand its team to reach more than 100 cities in Indonesia by the end of 2022. With the support of both local and well-connected funds such as ACV and BRI, Majoo believes the partnership will be a major inception point for their accelerating role in Indonesia’s MSMEs digitization.
AC Ventures insights: Emerging e-commerce opportunities in Indonesia