Olsera, a local cloud-based Point of Sale (POS) startup, has received US$ 2.5 million in seed funding from Kejora-SBI Orbit, a joint venture capital fund led by Kejora Capital, one of Southeast Asia’s top full-life-cycle investment firms, and SBI Holdings from Japan.
Olsera has helped over 10,000+ MSMEs across 300 cities in Indonesia digitise 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.
According to data from Indonesia’s Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises (Kemenkop UKM), 64.2 million MSMEs contributed 61% of the country’s GDP, or IDR 8.5 trillion in nominal value. By 2024, the Indonesian government has set a lofty goal of bringing over 30 million MSMEs into the digital economy ecosystem. According to the Indonesian E-Commerce Association (idEA), over 16.4 million (54.7%) of these MSMEs were effectively digitally enabled as of September 2021, with the rate of these MSMEs going digital in the country increasing by 2X during the COVID-19 epidemic.
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“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 digitalisation is no easy path. However, 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 utilise 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 records transactions and 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.
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“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 digitalise 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 is bullish on expanding its partnership base, one of which is access to integration with e-commerce platforms like Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, Blibli, and others to allow businesses to view their business’ performance in each store and platform, as well as aggregate all of their business traction in one aggregated view, providing a holistic snapshot of their businesses.