Thirteen graduate from Plug and Play Indonesia Batch 3

• Focused on seed and later-stage startups in its third batch
• Startups in fintech, insurtech, IoT, food & agriculture tech, sustainability invited for Batch 4

SILICON Valley-based Plug and Play startup accelerator showcased 13 startups from the third batch of its programme before investors, corporates, and the government at an event in Jakarta recently.

In this batch, there are combinations of local and foreign startups coming from the fintech, IoT, agriculture, sustainability, and edutech verticals.

The 13 startups are:

1. Bahasa.ai, a platform that enables machines to carry out commerce in Bahasa Indonesia using own Natural Processing Language (NPL).
2. Bildeco, a B2B building material marketplace for suppliers.
3. Circledoo, an online learning platform for the B2B market.
4. Gradana, a crowd funding platform for property.
5. HaloFina, a personal financial planner assistant application provider.
6. Tekno, a platform that provides utilities, food delivery, and ride-hailing services in rural areas in Indonesia.
7. Mertani, an agriculture platform that brings solutions by integrating sensor, IoT, and big data analytics.
8. Konsulife, an e-counseling platform for a company to manage employee stress.
9. TopKarir, a job portal that targets fresh graduates, and those with one to 5 years of experience, including blue and white collar jobs seekers.
10. Ceres Imaging (United States), offers solutions for farmers to optimise their crop production with sensors, software, and aircraft.
11. Resync (Singapore), provides on-site hardware and cloud based platform that enable full automation of multiple energy resources.
12. YouSolar (United States), provides sustainable product with solar and battery systems for power source.
13. Data Robot (United States), a platform that integrates machine learning which allows companies to solve problems.

“The reason we are bringing foreign startups is to provide an opportunity for foreign startups to share experiences and knowledge and collaborate with domestic startups. It will also open the way for foreign startups to expand into the Indonesian market,” says Plug and Play Indonesia managing director Wesley Harjono.

To date, all startups assisted by GK-PnP have been able to obtain advanced investment funds after the acceleration programme, totaling more than US$5 million.

“There have been 17 collaborative projects with ongoing corporate partners. This shows Indonesia’s growing startup ecosystem and corporations are opening doors wider to collaborate with startups.”

It currently has four corporate partners in Indonesia, namely Astra International, Bank BNI, Bank BTN, and SinarMas.

This programme also focused on seed and later-stage startups in its third batch compared to its first and second batches which focused mainly on seed-stage companies.

“Because we are looking for “quick-win” solutions, where early-stage startups might need more time to collaborate with corporate partners, and later-stage startups are more mature and faster in processing.”

Registration for its Batch 4 is now open and scheduled to close on Nov 6, 2018. In batch 4, GK-Plug and Play Indonesia will focus on 6 industrial verticals like fintech or (insurtech, IoT, mobility, food, agriculture, and sustainability.

Resync director and co-founder Emir Nurov tells Digital News Asia, “The programme gave us exposure to the local ecosystem, investors, especially to the government that help us to penetrate into the market.”

Circledoo founder Tasa Nugraza Barley says, “This helps us to prepare in terms of business and product development. And we had acquired some corporate clients through this programme.”