Glade Brook leads $20m round for Indonesia's Kitabeli

InnoVen Capital came in as a new investor, while AC Ventures and GoVentures, an affiliate of local super app GoTo, re-upped. AC and GoVentures participated in a separate round worth USD 8.2m as recently as May, according to AVCJ Research. That round also featured East Ventures, Kenangan Capital, and US-based Banana Capital. AC and East have backed the company since 2020.

Kitabeli offers a direct-to-consumer social commerce experience that differentiates itself by including daily household essentials rather than purely discretionary spending items. The app allows users to form groups that receive discounts from suppliers.

Rural engagement is promoted through gamification and a hyper-local delivery model. Most orders are same-day or next-day deliveries. The next-day delivery rate was said to be 95% as of 2020.

The company claims to have grown 10x in the past six months, driven by high demand in relatively untapped lower-tier cities. This is estimated to be a USD 100bn market with some 200m consumers contributing more than 50% of national GDP.

“We are excited to partner with Kitabeli to bring better, more affordable e-commerce access to second-tier communities in Indonesia. We believe the next wave of e-commerce growth in Indonesia will be driven by consumer demand outside major cities like Jakarta,” Linda Guo, a partner at Glade Brook, said in a statement.

“As a result, the winners will be new and innovative companies like Kitabeli, which bring deep connections to local community leaders and are built to serve the emerging middle-class consumer.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Media
• Early-stage
• Indonesia
• Innoven Capital
• AC Ventures
• GoTo
• e-commerce