BukuWarung, which provides a financial reporting application and management for micro-business credit transactions, announced a pre-series A fundraising led by Quona Capital. Several previous investors participate in this round, including East Ventures, AC Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners, and Michael Sampoerna.
There is no detailed information on when the target to close this round, but BukuWarung claims to have raised funds up to 8-digit value.
BukuWarung’s Co-Founder, Abhinary Peddisetty said, “Limited access to banks and other financial institutions makes micro businesses rely on pens, paper, and calculators to report on cash and credit transactions in their stores. Our vision is to build a digital infrastructure for 60 million MSMEs in Indonesia, which began with a simple application for recording financial and digital payments.”
As a new startup arrived in Indonesia, BukuWarung is one that is quite fast in fundraising. Last April, they had just announced seed funding led by East Ventures, the nominal was not mentioned. However, they are confident enough as they have successfully trusted by 250 thousand stalls in 500 cities and districts in Indonesia.
To date, they claim to win the trust of 600 thousand stalls three months later with distribution reaching 750 cities and districts throughout Indonesia.
“We will use the new funds to improve our technology team, go deeper into our product roadmap, increase the number of our traders (users), and meet the initial monetization goals in Q3 2020,” BukuWarung’s Co-founder Chinmay Chauhan said.
BukuWarung also plans to launch digital payments and provide access to financial services to traders, especially access to capital as a further form of innovation.
“We are leading the market in this sector with the strong focus on building superior products and better addressing our traders’ needs. We want to activate more than 1 million traders in the next 2 months,” Chinmay continued.
SME Empowerment services
BukuWarung is one of many new services focused on SME sector. From Mitra Tokopedia, Mitra Bukalapak, GrabKios, PayFazz, BukuKas, WarungPintar, Wahyoo, until recently Ula, are currently focusing on the SME sector with each role. From the digital process and supply chain.
This is quite difficult for BukuWarung, considering the early phase with more innovations from its competitors. In addition, BukuWarung is not offering other services besides reporting, amid the fast-moving startup phase, BukuWarung should further improve.
The company alone is optimistic with the accounting app concept that helps micro-businesses to manage debit and credit transactions. The automatic debt notification is said to help the shop owners to receive payment three times faster.
“We’re both come from micro-business family, therefore, we do have experience the difficulty in cash flow management and loan to expand the business. We designed the product to be useful to business owners with low-end smartphones, storage, or limited connectivity,” Chinmay said.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian