Indonesia social commerce start-up raises $28m

Insignia Ventures Partners, Y-Combinator Continuity Fund, and Amasia also participated, as did Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital. They were joined by TNB Aura and some partners of DST Global.

It brings total funding to at least $36 million, including a Series A in 2018 from Insignia and Alpha JWC Ventures. Last year, Arrive, the VC platform launched by rapper Jay-Z, made an investment of undisclosed size.

Aplikasi Super, known commercially as Super, was established in 2016 as a project of Nusantara Technology, a group of Indonesian millennials focused on youth-oriented business models. Nusantara was touted as the first Indonesian consumer start-up to be accepted in Y Combinator’s incubation program in 2018.

Super facilitates group buying and hyperlocal supply chain services in 17 lower-income cities across East Java. Its core product, SuperAgen, helps individuals establish online retail channels that leverage popular networks such as Facebook and Instagram. This is hoped to offset economic pressure on lower-tier cities, where goods can be significantly more expensive despite lower local spending power.

Super is often described as the Pinduoduo of Indonesia, but Steven Wongsoredjo, a co-founder and CEO of Nusantara, believes this is inaccurate. Pinduoduo emerged as a platform that built customer engagement around social networking and brought affordable goods to China’s previously underserved lower-tier cities. While Super is similar, its means of execution is different.

First, the company has no WeChat backbone to rely on. Second, its business model is a hybrid of Pinduoduo and Nice Tuan, a Chinese community group buying platform that recruits individuals in specific neighborhoods to aggregate demand for goods, place the orders, and organize collection or delivery.

“We did some surveys and found that [our target customers] are not used to apps and they aren’t willing to make calls to action to do transactions online. We need community leaders to aggregate demand in the villages,” Wongsoredjo told AVCJ last year. “The first wave of e-commerce in Indonesia followed the Taobao model but the four big guys [Lazada, Tokopedia, Shopee, and Bukalapak] only account for 4% of the overall retail market. We are adapting the model to O2O [online-to-offline].”

The COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have significantly accelerated the uptake of social commerce. Industry researcher iKala estimates that live-sales accounted for two-thirds of total e-commerce transactions in Southeast Asia in the first half of 2020, although its report excluded Indonesia. Other Indonesian movers in this space include Matahari, a large traditional retailer.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Media
• Consumer
• Early-stage
• Indonesia
• SoftBank Ventures Asia
• Insignia Venture Partners
• Y Combinator
• DST Advisors
• e-commerce
• TMT