Jakarta, 21 March 2022 – Sayurbox, Indonesia’s leading B2C and B2B e-grocery startup, today announced its oversubscribed Series C round of US$ 120+ million led by Northstar and Alpha JWC Ventures, with participation from new investor International Finance Corporation (IFC). Existing investors Astra, Syngenta Group Ventures, and Global Brain as well as other prominent angel investors also participated in this fundraising round. Groceries is one of Indonesia’s largest consumer segments at more than US$ 120 billion in retail value. However, food supply chains remain highly fragmented and inefficient. Direct from farm e-Grocery businesses help shorten the entire supply, enabling the reduction of food wastage and logistics costs, while providing better margins for farmers and lower prices for consumers. According to the e-Conomy SEA 2021 report by Google, Temasek and Bain, the recent pandemic has driven higher e-Grocery adoption among consumers in SEA, with 1 in 4 grocery dollars expected to be spent online by 2030.
Founded in 2017, Sayurbox is building Indonesia’s fastest-growing e-Grocery platform with full integration from farm to end consumer. Its platform offers more than 5,000 SKUs, ranging from fresh produce, meat and poultry, snacks, and ready-to-eat dishes. Sayurbox currently serves around 1 million customers in Java and Bali and works with more than 10,000 farmers nationwide.
Read also: Seed Funding and Ways to Get Investors for Startups
Sayurbox co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Amanda Susanti said, “Sayurbox was founded with the social mission of providing market access to local farmers through the digitalization of Indonesia’s agri-supply chain. Our proprietary demand forecasting, inventory planning and route optimization algorithms enable us to have full visibility of our entire agri-supply chain, delivering the best customer experience in terms of better freshness, pricing, on-time delivery, and product range. This translates into better customer satisfaction, loyalty and repeats, while reducing wastage and lowering fulfillment costs. We are extremely grateful and excited to be partnering with strong value-add investors Northstar and Alpha JWC Ventures who believe in our vision.”
Sayurbox’s new funding comes less than a year after the company raised US$15 million in Series B funding led by Astra. Since then, Sayurbox has experienced exponential growth through increasing its range of products, expanding from the Greater Jakarta area to Surabaya (East Java) and Bali, as well as building a network of micro-fulfilment hubs to service Sayurbox’s quick commerce service, SayurKilat. The new funds will be used to accelerate e-Grocery penetration in new and existing cities and extend Sayurbox’s end-to-end supply chain nationwide.
Patrick Walujo, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Northstar, added “We are big believers in empowering small businesses and entrepreneurs through technology. Having known Amanda and tracked Sayurbox’s growth since 2017, we can tell the Sayurbox team is truly passionate about making a social impact on Indonesia’s small holders and individual farmers through Sayurbox’s e-Grocery platform. e-Grocery is the next frontier for e-Commerce, and we are excited about working closely with Amanda and her team to grow the Sayurbox platform throughout Indonesia.”
Read also: Early Startup Funding Stages: Explained From Seed to IPO
Eko Kurniadi, Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures, said “Growing in this vertical is difficult as there are huge execution risks especially given the fragmented logistics and different consumer behavior in cities across Indonesia; however, Sayurbox has figured out the playbook to tackle these challenges by building a proprietary supply chain comparable to global e-grocery leaders. This best-in-class operation allows Sayurbox to deliver high quality produce from harvest to doorstep within 12 hours ensuring peak freshness. With this raise, they are now ready to expand even further. We are looking forward to working together with Amanda and her team!”
“Scaling up digital platforms such as Sayurbox can make a huge contribution towards unlocking access to markets and finance and lifting prosperity for millions of farmers through increased velocity of money and a higher penetration rate of SMEs,” said Azam Khan, IFC Country Manager for Indonesia and Timor-Leste. “That’s why digitalization is a key pillar of our strategy and a true game-changer now and in post-Covid-19 business environments.
