BukuKas, the startup that aims to digitize Indonesia’s micro, small, and medium enterprises, has bagged another USD 10 million in a Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital India, according to an announcement on Tuesday. Together with the USD 9 million it raised in August last year, the firm has now collected a total of USD 22 million. Existing investors Saison Capital, January Capital, Founderbank Capital, Cambium Grove, Endeavor Catalyst, and Amrish Rau also participated in this round.
Founded in 2019, the company claims to have already registered 3.5 million small merchants and retailers as of November 2020, crossing 1.8 million monthly active users. Those recorded USD 17.4 billion worth of transactions on an annualized basis.
The recent acquisition of one of its closest competitor helped BukuKas to expand its dominance with a combined 75% market share, according to its CEO and co-founder. “By acquiring Catatan Keuangan Harian, we got access to an extremely engaged user base of 300,000 active merchants, which were acquired completely organically,” Krishnan Menon told KrASIA. “The acquisition allowed us to substantially expand our leadership in the segment.”
Menon argues that its competition today are the existing norms of how things have been done over the last few decades. This stands in contrast to the way the firm envisions the coming decade.
“Having said that, we are well aware of different companies approaching the same 60 million SME segment from different angles,” he said. “What put us as a clear market leader is our team, how deeply we know the market and understand our merchants.”
Bookkeeping is just one of the key activities where merchants are facing impediments and increasingly look at digitization as the most obvious solution, according to Menon. BukuKas offers other services beyond this. New features include expense analytics, which shows users what type of costs are affecting their profits, and a tool to generates invoices that can be shared easily.
BukuKas will also include a payment function into the app later this month, the company announced in a statement.
