Indonesia e-commerce SaaS player gets $80m Series C
Lummo, an Indonesian e-commerce software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider for small businesses, has raised USD 80m in Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital India.
CapitalG, a VC unit of Alphabet previously known as Google Capital, also participated, as did UK-based Hedosophia and Maximilian Bittner, formerly CEO of Lazada. The plan is to expand operations around Southeast Asia.
Lummo was founded in 2019 by former employees of Lazada Indonesia as a bookkeeping app for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) called BukuKas. It aims to be a one-stop shop for e-commerce tools that help MSME merchants create retail websites and manage their cash flows digitally.
The app, which is said to have more than 7m registered MSME users, also sends WhatsApp reminders to customers when credit is due. This process is said to allow small business owners to achieve up to 20% cost reduction and save 2-4 hours per day by avoiding manual calculations and reconciliation.
Recent traction includes the launch of a direct-to-consumer (D2C) product called LummoShop, which has functions supporting branding and customer engagement. LummoShop also incorporates Whatsapp chat integrations, catalogue and website management, and multi-platform management services. Its gross merchandise value grew by 11X from December 2020 to December 2021.
CapitalG said its confidence in the company was related to the barriers to MSMEs that want to establish businesses on more established marketplaces such as Shopee, Tokopedia, and Lazada. The idea is that sellers on marketplaces don’t own the customer relationships, making it difficult for them to build brand presence or control their own destinies.
“It is becoming common for sellers to build their brands on social media and via word of mouth and to sell through WhatsApp,” CapitalG executives Sumi Das, Jeremy Zhu, and Nina Gerson said in a joint online post. “We believe social selling will become a massive trend in the region and will require new infrastructure to meet the needs of MSME sellers.”
Google estimates that from 2019 to 2021, e-commerce sales in Southeast Asia grew from USD 38bn to USD 120bn as 80m people in the region shopped online for the first time. CapitalG believes the rising popularity of e-wallets and buy now-pay later operations will lift sales to USD 234bn by 2025.
Last year, Lummo raised a USD 50m Series B that included Hedosophia and a USD 10m Series A featuring Sequoia India, Saison Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FounderBank Capital, Cambium Grove Capital, and January Capital.
Sequoia India, Saison, January, Cambium, S7V, and SpeedInvest provided a USD 9m seed round in 2020. Several prominent angel investors have also backed the company, including entrepreneurs associated with Pinelabs, Kopi Kenangan, and KoinWorks, as well as Patrick Walujo, a co-founder of Northstar Group.
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