Deal focus: Waresix builds Indonesia’s logistical lynchpin

Indonesia is by far Asia’s biggest logistics headache. It has more than twice the number of islands as the Philippines at some 17,500. These are home more than double the Philippines’ population, with around 267 million distributed remarkably evenly across the archipelago. At least 15 cities across 10 provinces can easily count more than one million people. It takes eight hours to fly coast to coast.

This is why there are not a lot of companies quite like Waresix in other markets. The start-up brings a multi-modal approach to the standard enterprise logistics dashboard concept, linking not only trucks, but also ships, trains, and warehouses into a one-stop operating system-style platform. Users can track their counterparties’ consignments across transport channels.

All participants in the supply chain are white-labeled as part of the Waresix ecosystem, which encompasses 375 warehouses and 40,000 trucks in more than 100 cities. The more than 250 corporate clients include Unilever, Indofood, Siam Cement Group, and JD.com Indonesia. The focus is intercity shipments; last-mile in the land of Gojek and Grab is seen as too competitive.

“In the past, if you wanted to access small cities, you had to call the local vendors one by one on the island and ask them to send you a quote,” says Wilson Cuaca, a managing partner at East Ventures. “Then you call all the vendors on the next island, and in between, you figure out how to actually unload your goods from one vendor to another at the warehouses, and re-pick them up. All these things had to be done manually.”

This week, Waresix closed an approximately $75 million Series B led by Jungle Ventures and EV Growth, a joint venture between East, Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Digital Ventures and Japan’s YJ Capital. It brings total funding this year to $200 million, including a Series A in January, also led by Jungle and EV. This show of confidence says much about operational resilience during COVID-19, with the company consistently maintaining profitability since June last year.

There’s also something to be said for the big picture. Waresix estimates Indonesia’s overall logistics market is worth $240 billion, about $55 billion of which is in the trucking and warehousing segment. Importantly, this is arguably highest-cost markets of its kind in Asia, and the distinction is slowing down economic development. Logistics costs are said to account for up to 30% of Indonesia’s $1 trillion GDP. The government is hoping to get that figure to 19% this year.

“Our guiding star is to make sure logistics costs in the country are going down. When there’s efficiency, things get better, bigger, and faster, and productivity improves,” Cuaca says. “In China, it’s so efficient, companies don’t need to think about logistics much. They just focus on what they do and leave it to someone else. That’s the dream we want to achieve.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Early-stage
• Support services
• Indonesia
• Transportation
• Logistics
• EV Growth
• Jungle Ventures