Indonesia is one of Southeast Asia’s most promising startup market. Today, its ecosystem gained a new investor with the launch of Intudo Ventures’ debut fund, which has more than $10 million to invest into about 12 to 16 early-stage startups, as well as joint ventures with overseas companies that want to break into the Indonesian market.
Intudo was founded by Eddy Chan and Patrick Yip (pictured above), who are working with founding advisor Timothy Chen. Collectively, the three have invested in a notable roster of companies including PayPal, SpaceX, Palantir, Netscreen, and Fortinet. Intudo (a combination of the Bahasa Indonesian words for integrity, sincerity, and serendipity) will look for companies in e-commerce, finance, healthcare, education, and media.
While Indonesia’s startup industry and venture capital ecosystem are still young, Chan told TechCrunch that Intudo’s team “sees strikingly similar trends to what we observed in China in the early 2000s.”
Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest country by population, with about 260 million people, and it is also one of the fastest-growing Internet markets by penetration, with Internet users (most mobile-first) expected to jump from a current 92 million to 215 million in 2020.
Furthermore, Indonesia’s population is relatively young and increasingly affluent, and this gives consumer startups a lot of opportunities.
For example, Indonesian-based marketplace Tokopedia has raised about $248 million from investors including SoftBank, while Alibaba poured $1 billion into Lazada last year to gain a stronger foothold in Southeast Asia e-commerce. A few other examples of tech companies and investors paying close attention to Southeast Asia—and Indonesia in particular—include Tencent (which recently led a $1.2 billion round in on-demand transportation startup Go-Jek), Amazon, and JD.com.
Another parallel between Indonesia and China’s startup industries is the high-profile of…