JAKARTA, Indonesia, Jan.7, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Olsera, a homegrown cloud-based Point of Sales (POS) startup, has raised US$ 2.5 million in seed round funding from Kejora-SBI Orbit, a joint venture capital fund helmed by Kejora Capital, one of Southeast Asia's largest full life-cycle investment firm and SBI Holdings from Japan.
Co-Founders of Olsera: Novendy & Ali, with Shunichi Keida, Billy Boen & Richie Wirjan from Kejora-SBI Orbit
Olsera has helped over 10,000+ MSMEs across 300 cities in Indonesia digitize their business at scale. With this fresh capital, Olsera seeks to strengthen its technological infrastructure, recruit more talents and accelerate their merchant acquisition in another 200 cities in Indonesia.
Data from Indonesia's Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises (Kemenkop UKM) shows that 64.2 million MSMEs have contributed 61% to the nation's economy, amounting to IDR 8.5 trillion in nominal value. The Indonesian government has set an ambitious target to onboard over 30 million MSMEs into the digital economy ecosystem by 2024. Per September 2021, the Indonesian E-Commerce Association (idEA) has found that over 16.4 million (54.7%) of said MSMEs have successfully been digitally enabled, where, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the country has seen over 2X in the rate at which these MSMEs have gone digital.
"As the largest contributor to our country's economy, MSMEs deserve a lot of attention to survive and thrive through the pandemic and beyond. We aim to back Olsera and its founders who are committed to forward their vision in stimulating the nation's digital economy growth," relayed Billy Boen, Fund Director of Kejora-SBI Orbit.
The road towards MSME digitalization is no easy path, however, considering that business owners in this space face limitations in capital, internet access, and sales distribution channels on top of the need to grow their know-hows to effectively adopt and utilize their digital platforms.
"As fellow entrepreneurs, we truly understand how challenging it is to grow and sustain a business, including the complications that come in our way. Since 2015, Olsera has been committed to support entrepreneurs grow and manage their businesses in a simple manner through technology." shared Novendy Chen, co-founder and CEO of Olsera.
As a POS, Olsera not only records transactions, but also provides ERP features that business owners find very useful, allowing them to control across departments from anywhere and anytime, including accounting, inventory management, promotions, employee management, and customer service.
"During the pandemic, we saw that quite a number of MSME business partners were affected because the shops were still offline. We launched Olsera Store so that businesses can pivot their offline stores to online. On the other hand, MSMEs in services sector also suffered lost as social distancing is taken place. We also need to digitalize their business, thus we developed Zenwel. Specifically designed for the needs of services MSMEs, Zenwel provides great features such as calendar scheduling, online booking, CRM, and loyalty/membership programs to improve their customer acquisition and retention." Ali Tjin, co-founder & CTO of Olsera added.
Olsera itself also continues to be bullish in growing its partnership base, one of which is access to integration with e-commerce platforms such as Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, Blibli, and more to allow businesses to view their business' performance in each store and platform, but also aggregate all their business traction in one aggregated view, providing a holistic snapshot of their businesses.
ABOUT KEJORA-SBI ORBIT:
Kejora-SBI Orbit is a 30 million dollar joint VC fund between Kejora Capital, One of Southeast Asia's largest full life-cycle Investment firm with over US$ 600 million AUM and SBI Holdings from Japan. We are investing and growing Indonesia-focused early-stage tech startups.
