BukuWarung secures $60 mn in Series A, plans to expand engineering, products team in India

Jakarta, Indonesia headquartered accounting app for small merchants, BukuWarung, has raised $60 million (about Rs 439.4 crore) in a Series A round of funding even as it looks to expand its engineering and product teams in Bengaluru and other locations in India.   

The round was led by New York based venture capital firm Valar Ventures and Silicon Valley based Goodwater Capital. Returning investor Quona Capital and angel investors in the company including Ravish Naresh, CEO of Khatabook, Aldi Haryopratomo, former CEO of GoPay, Klarna founder Victor Jacobsson as well as partners from SoftBank and Trihill Capital participated in the round, per a statement. 

The fresh capital takes BukuWarung’s total fundraise to $80 million.  

Apart from expanding its presence in India, the company expects to use the capital to grow in Singapore and Indonesia, and double its team size from 150 at present to 300 in a year. 

 The company will also expand its product portfolio to include QR based payments, financial services and other capabilities for the MSMEs it works with, per the statement. 

 Founded in 2019 by founders of Indian origin founders Abhinay Peddisetty and Chinmay Chauhan, BukuWarung provides accounting services to small merchants. It later added digital payments to help customers sell online amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The company plans to expand into other MSME-focused financial services including lending, insurance and savings for their online growth.  

“The digital solutions specific to the needs of small businesses (MSMEs) in the emerging economies of Asia and the world are the need of the hour with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Peddisetty, CEO at BukuWarung, said in the statement.  

“We are already a leader in MSME digital payment in Indonesia. With this funding, we aim to leverage the talent base and learnings from the MSME ecosystem across Asia, including India, for the digital empowerment of MSMEs in Indonesia and beyond,” he added. 

The company claims to serve a network of 6.5 million registered merchants across 750 cities and towns in Indonesia. Since the introduction of digital payments in 2020, the platform has processed nearly $1.4 billion transactions over a year.  

BukuWarung’s business is similar to book-keeping operations providers B Capital backed Khatabook, Vyapaar and Tiger Global backed OkCredit which are leveraging transaction data from small merchants and kirana stores to extend credit and other financial services.