Indonesia's BRI Ventures launches fund
BRI Ventures, a unit of Bank Rakyat Indonesia, has launched a locally incorporated fund that will invest local start-ups.
The vehicle, known as Sembrani Nusantara, is targeting a first close of IDR300 billion ($21.2 million). The final targeted corpus has not been specified.
Sembrani Nusantara is being touted as significant milestone for the local ecosystem after being licensed by the financial services authority OJK. Most VC funds in Indonesia have historically operated either as entities incorporated offshore or corporate funds that invest off the balance sheet of a parent company.
The fund will focus on start-ups in education, agriculture, maritime, retail, transportation, and healthcare sectors. This is a departure for BRI Ventures, which has traditionally focused on financial technology categories. The firm said that it would prioritize “value over valuation” by seeking out companies that are able to survive coronavirus-related disruption.
“[W]e can see that the industry is shifting dramatically,” Nick Widjaja, CEO of BRI Ventures (pictured), said in a statement. “Until recently, the priority for local start-ups has been to grow at all costs. Now, the name of the game is to simply survive and reach sustainable growth.”
Sembrani Nusantara translates roughly as “unicorn archipelago” although a sembrani refers to a different creature of local folklore rather than a unicorn. Widjaja described this as part of the hyper-local theme of the fund and a turning point for Indonesia as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
“The concept of the unicorn itself is a word adopted straight from Silicon Valley,” he added. “It’s a concept that we think is beginning to lose its alignment with Indonesia’s digital ecosystem. We feel that we need our own symbol, one that can inspire local start-ups to rise from the ground and fly high.”
BRI Ventures claims to have about $250 million in assets under management. The firm was active earlier this year as part of a $17 million round for TaniHub, an online marketplace for farm products. It appointed Widjaja as CEO last year when he stepped down from MDI Ventures, the corporate VC arm of state-controlled telecommunications giant Telkom Indonesia.
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