Advotics secures US$2.7mil in seed funding led by East Ventures

• Will use funds to infuse deeper technology in product development and solutions
• One breakthrough solution involves digitising products using an unique identity

ADVOTICS, an Indonesia-based SaaS startup focusing on helping supply chain stakeholders create data-driven decision-making, on May 14 announced the closing of an US$2.7 million (RM11.25 million) seed investment round led by East Ventures.

The company plans to use the fresh funds to infuse deeper technology in product development and solutions offered to customers and accelerate customer growth.

Advotics was founded with the mission to solve pain points faced by most companies as a result of still relying on the offline method to manage and track their sales and distribution operations. With a lot of manual paperwork, time is spent mostly on mundane tasks and less on real strategic initiatives.

The company’s management team consists of three engineers with diverse backgrounds and in-depth industry wisdom: Boris Sanjaya is an industrial engineer with consulting experience in the Boston Consulting Group, Hendi Chandi is ex-senior Amazon software developer from a computer science engineering programmes at the University of Washington Seattle, and Jeffry Tani is a Ph.D. holder in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

Advotics introduced a cloud platform to digitise the workforce, business network, as well as physical assets and products, with the main objective of converting data from offline work & trade activities into insightful metrics for management to make important decisions such as sales penetration, productivity and retail execution strategy.

One of Advotics’ breakthrough solutions involves digitising products using an unique identity, e.g. a QR code printed on the packaging. For the past 24 months, it has been placed on more than 100 million units.

Advotics provides a management and analytics platform to track and trace distribution for better analytics, price and distribution control, as well as offline-influencer marketing.

For the distribution business, Advotics has improved salespersons’ productivity, resulting in an overall increase of 49% in store visits per day.

In less than two years after a product launch, Advotics was able to win contracts from more than 50 corporate clients, such as ExxonMobil, HM Sampoerna (an affiliate of Phillip Morris International), Danone, Mulia Group, Saint Gobain, Nutrifood, and Indosurya.

Advotics co-founder and chief technology officer Hendi Chandi, commented, “Clients can purchase the solution based on their needs, either the total digitalisation solution or on a per-module basis.

“Advotics also provides highly-demanded industry features, such as an in-store productivity app for the workforce with a geo-tracking, dispatch and route management system, offline-to-online marketing, B2B commerce platform, and a powerful BI & analytics dashboard for management. With this product portfolio, Advotics can cater for the needs of both larger corporates and the smaller SME segment.”

“Customers especially like our easy-to-use platform, its high relevancy with their daily activities, and affordability as they pay on a per-user subscription basis,” said Advotics co-founder and chief production officer Jeffry Tani.

East Ventures managing partner Willson Cuaca, said, "Corporate digital transformation is sweeping Indonesia in a big wave. We have been witnessing the shift from a consumer market into the B2B model rapidly in the last couple of months. The Advotics team really nailed down the core problem of supply chain monitoring in Indonesia.

“Advotics’ solution helps corporates monitor the movement of their workforce and goods. Data points collected have been used to understand the product distribution heatmap and supply chain efficiency. We believe this is just the beginning of supply chain transformation in Indonesia. We welcome the Advotics team to East Ventures' B2B ecosystem."