Jakarta, 19 May 2022 – Indonesia’s largest poultry tech startup Pitik today announced its USD 14 million Series A funding round led by Alpha JWC Ventures with participation from existing investors MDI Ventures and Wavemaker Partners. With this fresh funding, Pitik will expand its ecosystem to empower more chicken farmers in Indonesia.
Launched mid-2021 by serial entrepreneurs Arief Witjaksono and Rymax Joehana, Pitik is fueled by a mission to empower poultry farmers in Indonesia. The company is building the largest community of poultry farmers in Indonesia and equipping them with end-to-end solutions in technology, financing, and supply chain. Through its services, Pitik solves inefficiencies in farm production and streamlines the supply chain to create a fair ecosystem for farmers to grow and improve their welfare. Such support is much needed by local farms that have always been dealing with low efficiency, operational difficulties, and late or even non-payment during harvest time. These problems resulted in a national mortality rate that is 5-8 times higher than the global average and up to IDR 2 billion of annual revenue leakage per farm due to poor chicken growth rate, which is avoidable should there be better care and farm management.
Pitik provides farmers with full-stack farm management technology to improve their productivity. Upon joining Pitik ecosystem, all farms are installed with IoT (internet-of-things) systems and farmers are given access to Pitik smart farming application to facilitate real-time farm monitoring and instant issue identification through its farm algorithm. Beyond technology, Pitik leverages on its ecosystem to supply quality farm input to farmers, provide financing services, and offtake the harvest with the best prices and guaranteed terms of payment. With these services, Pitik has become the most trusted partner for farmers throughout their business cycles.
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Pitik technology has proven to empower farm workers to independently achieve higher operations yield, with its farm partners (‘Kawan Pitik’) achieving higher efficiency compared to average Indonesian farmers. Based on the company’s latest data, Kawan Pitik farmers managed to push down the mortality rate by half and improve feed conversion ratio by 12% compared to national average, eventually increasing their income.
“We have proven that our technology is effective in helping farmers improve their yield and our ecosystem is capable of providing value added services for farmers. Our big dream is to empower all poultry farmers in Indonesia through our integrated services and make sure we can improve their livelihood. This funding round will enable us to reach out to more farmers, but also to drive further innovation and unlock additional efficiency gains for farmers,” says Co-Founder and CEO Arief Witjaksono.
In the past 6 months, Pitik has increased its farm network size by over 10x through partnering with hundreds of farmers in 53 districts in West and Central Java. From this network of farmers, Pitik is currently selling over 16 million chickens annually – making Pitik the largest poultry startup in terms of business size in Indonesia, despite being operational for less than one year.
With this new funding, Pitik is set to continue developing advanced technologies and farm automation products that will increase farm productivity even further. It also targets to build a presence in all areas of Java this year and expand to other islands in 2023. The company will also expand its business to downstream services such as processing and distribution to end users.
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“We have unlocked the upstream business opportunities in poultry farming. Expanding downstream means we can help farmers extract higher margin from the value chain. This is aligned with our mission to be farmers’ partner in all points of the farming journey,” says Co-Founder and COO Rymax Joehana. “Not only that, this also means we can provide healthier and higher quality chicken for Indonesian consumers as products sold by Pitik are sourced fresh from our network of farmers with the most stringent standards of quality control & product traceability.”
The fresh funding will also be used for aggressive team expansion. Headquartered in the Greater Jakarta Area with operations in 14 cities, Pitik aims to add dozens of deep tech engineers, operations professionals, as well as poultry experts to its current team. “We welcome everyone with passion in agriculture and farmer empowerment to join Pitik. We have established our initial presence well, now we are looking forward to expanding our presence nationwide,” Rymax says.
“We are super excited to be working with Arief and Rymax. Pitik has built the first full-stack tech-enabled poultry farm management solution which enables them to offer competitive pricing and a stable supply of farm inputs. They are working with leading upstream integrators to strengthen their ecosystem play further and have achieved solid early traction. We believe this competitive advantage allows Pitik to be at the forefront of enhancing Indonesia’s entire poultry value chain,” says Eko Kurniadi, Partner at Alpha JWC Ventures.
