Indonesia fintech start-up Ajaib achieves unicorn status
Ajaib, an online stock-trading platform in Indonesia, has raised $153 million in a Series B funding round led by DST Global at a valuation of $1 billion.
Several existing investors re-upped. They include Ribbit Capital, Li Ka-Shing-controlled Horizons Ventures, Iconiq Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Insignia Ventures, Alpha JWC Ventures, and SoftBank Ventures Asia.
The company - which plans to use the new funding for recruitment and product development - is Indonesia's seventh unicorn, according to a Linkedin post by co-founders Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan.
Stanford University classmates Sumarli and Piyajomkwan established the business in 2019, targeting millennials who are learning about investment and wealth management for the first time. Only about 1% of Indonesia's population are active stock market investors. The company is a graduate of Y Combinator.
Ajaib took its time positioning and polishing its product, with Sumarli noting that “slow is faster.” However, it then rose quickly. In June 2020, just seven months after launch, Ajaib was Indonesia's fifth-largest stockbroker by number of trades. The company has now around one million investors. More than 10 billion lots of shares were traded through its platform.
“We experimented in 2019, found a product-market fit in 2020, and hyper-scaled in 2021. We at Ajaib believe in finding product-market fit first before growth. Too many fintech startups today rush to growth before proving product-market fit. They burn on marketing [from] day one to force traction to raise,” Sumarli said.
Horizons Ventures and Alpha JWC led a $25 million Series A round in January. Ribbit then led a $65 million extension. DST and Ribbit are both investors in US-based online brokerage Robinhood Markets, which Ajaib views as a benchmark.
It is not the only Indonesian start-up with this aspiration. In May, Bibit closed a $65 million round barely four months after raising $30 million. Sequoia Capital India led both investments. Other VC-backed robo-advisory businesses include Bareksa and Fundtastic.
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