Chickin, an Indonesia-based poultry startup, said Friday it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by East Ventures with the participation of other investors.
The investment will accelerate Chickin’s mission in enhancing Indonesia’s food security, where Chickin will allocate the fund to focus on improving their growth, people, technology, partner acquisition, and farmers empowerment to ensure the best quality and maximum amount of production, Chickin said in a statement.
Chickin was founded in 2020 by Ashab Alkahfi (Co-Founder and President), Tubagus Syailendra (Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer), Ahmad Syaifullah (Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer); where they previously had been actively cultivating the chicken as farmers in the last five years.
Based on these experiences, they realized the inefficiency in growing the chicken as well as the industry which is very highly fragmented; the cycle of chicken harvest and consumption is very fast moving, which results in uncontrollable supply and demand.
Chickin aims to democratize the poultry industry by utilizing and integrating the internet of things (IoT) technology and data management to increase farmers income by saving their feed cost through climate control.
Moreover, it provides financing in farm inputs as well as a channel to sell high quality chicken to business-to-business (B2B) customers through data transparency (supply-demand matchmaking); where commonly there is a high possibility of mismatch resulting in supply availability and quality issues in industry.
Chickin provides a technology solution in the form of cloud-based software for farmers, enabling them to carry out effective cultivation management with dashboard monitoring, transparency of livestock supervision, and cage management tools.
In addition, it produces the hardware with the integration of IoT in creating an optimal food conversion ratio (FCR). The hardware enables the adjustments and setting of climate suited for the chicken in ensuring the increased productivity.
“All of these tools were created as efficiently as possible, affordable by farmers, and easy to use. We have a big goal to create food security in the consumption of chicken broilers in Indonesia,” said Ahmad.
The company has also impacted thousands of farmers and acquired more than 150+ farm locations with more than 2.6 million chickens population capacity. It also has been trusted by more than 200 clients consisting of the leading food and beverage (F&B) brand, food catering, and even food processing.
Chickin has also experienced more than 50 times growing revenue figures in the past one year.
“We are aware that chicken is an animal protein that can be consumed by everyone. With a very large total domestic market, coupled with the 16 percent growth of annual consumption based on the historical trends for the past five years, Chickin has a mission to reach the untapped potential market in the industry by partnering with several stakeholders from upstream to downstream to enter the market by ecosystem that we made,” said Tubagus.
East Ventures Partner Melisas Irene said agriculture is one of the sectors that is less digitalized, yet it is strategically important for the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
“This sector has enormous potential given how staple chicken is to every Indonesian’s daily consumption. We are confident of this mission and believe that the solutions provided by the Chickin team will bring greater economic opportunity for chicken farmers,” she said.
East Ventures is a pioneering and leading sector-agnostic venture capital firm headquartered in Singapore. Founded in 2009, the firm has transformed into a holistic platform that provides multi-stage investment, including seed and growth for over 200 companies in Southeast Asia.