KedaiSayur (PT Kedai Sayur Indonesia) announced the latest funding in a bridge round worth of $3.5 million or around 50 billion Rupiah. The investors involved are yet to be disclosed. In the release, KedaiSayur also confirmed its status as a tech-based wholesale company under the Triputra Group.

The bridge round concept is basically investors participating in a startup funding to close the next series. In general, the latest equity count will be delivered after the company met a certain target, according to the agreement and based on the value disbursed by each investor. In addition, there is an agreed deadline regarding the closing of the next series.

Previously, the competitor, Sayurbox, also announced the funding in the bridge round from Metrodata.

The fresh funds is said to be focused on supporting business acceleration and advancing the platform’s technology. This is in line with the target growth — until the end of 2021, KedaiSayur claims to have achieved 24x business growth compared to the previous year through the KedaiMart application.

“With our commitment as a good supply chain management to provide grocery from upstream to downstream, KedaiSayur continues to improve service quality and always offer added value for all partners. It is because customer satisfaction is the key in our business development, therefore, we will continue to make efforts to create operational excellence,” KedaiSayur’s CEO, Adrian Hernanto said.

Adrian also mentioned, in addition to providing convenience to fulfill people’s needs of groceries through applications and dashboards for ordering, KedaiSayur is currently focus on slowly developing the land digitization. “Through monitoring with tech, we can do forecasting and each region will later be able to have sufficient data to increase their business scale, which is supported by the data transparency generated through the digitization process,” he said.

Pivoting due to pandemic

In May 2020, KedaiSayur announced a business pivot to online food delivery service. Previously, the company served B2B consumers such as hotels, restaurants and cafes, and vegetable vendors who wanted to supply food ingredients for selling.

The thing is, the food product market has started to change since the Covid-19 began in early March. Demand from hotels, restaurants and cafes drop by 50%. Previously, the growth of this business could reach more than 20% per month. Meanwhile, at the same time, the demand from vegetable growers and household customers has increased significantly. The company is confident to take pivot decisions based on this.

On the other hand, operational restrictions on the wholesale market and local markets disrupt the distribution pattern of fresh food products in Indonesia. This has an impact not only on consumers who cannot shop at the market, farmers also lose the medium to distribute their harvests.

In February 2021, KedaiSayur released the KedaiMart application to provide daily grocery with the concept of “supermarket in your pocket”. Previously, apart from the application itself, users could also order KedaiSayur products through Tokopedia and Blibli.

Growing market, tighten competition

Since it was founded in 2018, KedaiSayur has closed two funding rounds, with a total of $5.3 million supported by some investors, including East Ventures, SMDV, Triputra Group, and Multi Persada Nusantara. Currently, they have more than 5 thousand partners from vegetable traders, HORECA, and wholesale markets. They also cooperate with 250 farmers who provide product supplies to meet their needs.

According to the IGD report, the size of the wholesale market in Indonesia will reach $169.4 billion in 2022 with a CAGR of 5.2% in the last two years. This position confirms Indonesia as the 13th largest wholesale market in the world, and the second largest in Asia after China. It iis indeed a huge business potential, considering the size of traditional retail businesses.

The pandemic that accelerates digitization is a key opportunity for online store players. It’s clear that throughout the pandemic, startups in this field continue to raise funds to support the business growth.

Local technology giants has held a series of corporate actions related to strengthening the wholesale online business. Last September 2021, Blibli online marketplace officially acquired a 51% stake in Ranch Market, which operates 48 wholesale retail stores in various cities. Recently, there are also several integration, from the creation of the official Ranch Market channel on the Blibli application. Meanwhile, GoTo also acquired 6.74% of Hypermart retail network owners, which is likely to strengthen GoMart’s business.

New players also keep popping up with different approaches. For example, Japang, which was initiated by the founder and investor of ex-Tanihub, which focuses on providing access to online wholesale services for users outside Java. Until Astro came up with the quick commerce concept.

Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian