Under the Radar: Y Combinator, Softbank-backed Social commerce startup Aplikasi Super on making FMCGs accessible in rural Indonesia

The Evening Runway with Hongbin Jeong, Roshan Gidwani and Chua Tian Tian

It’s all about making FMCGs more accessible to consumers in rural Indonesia today.

With a population of over 277 million people, Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, with a GDP of around US$1.32 trillion back in 2022.

At the same time, data from Statista showed Indonesian households allocating almost a fifth of their household expenses for FMCGs since 2018.

While the numbers look promising, about forty per cent of Indonesian reside in the rural parts of the country, making accessibility a key challenge for consumers.

The internet appears to be key to bringing FMCGs to the consumers, with over three quarters of people (77%) in the country using the internet on a regular basis.

And that’s exactly what our guest for today leveraged to tap underserved rural communities in Indonesia.

Founded in 2018, Aplikasi Super is a social commerce startup that aims to enable community leaders to become retailers of their own by selling through its Super app.

The company operates a central warehouse and works with third-party logistics providers to deliver FMCG items to these community leaders, who are individuals or mom-and-pop shops called warungs. That’s done within a day of placing the order.

According to a TechCrunch article out in June 2022, the firm said then that it boasts a network of thousands of community agents, distributing millions of dollars of items to communities each month. But what are the numbers looking at right now?

Meanwhile, the firm had in June 2022 raised US$70 million in an oversubscribed Series C round. Those participating in the round included the likes of Insignia Venture Partners, SoftBank Ventures Asia, B Capital and more. Question is – how has the money been used thus far and how far has the capital injection augmented the firm’s growth trajectory?

On Under the Radar, The Evening Runway’s finance presenter Chua Tian Tian posed these questions to Alfred Ali, Chief Product Officer, Aplikasi Super.

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