Olsera, a cloud-based point of sale (POS) firm that helps Indonesian businesses go digital, has secured US $2.5 million in seed investment from Kejora-SBI Orbit, a US $30 million funds managed by Kejora Capital and SBI Holdings of Japan.
Olsera plans to use the funds to improve its technology infrastructure, hire additional employees, and expand its merchant base to 200 new communities around the archipelago.
Business owners in Indonesia suffer financial constraints, limited internet connection, and limited sales distribution methods, on top of the requirement to expand their know-how in order to properly embrace and use digital platforms.
Olsera, as a point-of-sale system, assists SMEs in going digital. It keeps track of transactions and gives them access to ERP functions like accounting, inventory management, promotions, staff management, and customer support from anywhere and at any time.
The company claims to have assisted over 10,000 MSMEs in Indonesian cities throughout 300 cities in digitising their operations.
Olsera wants to expand its partner network and interface with e-commerce platforms like Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, and Blibli so that businesses can track their success across all of their stores and platforms.
According to data from Indonesia’s Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises, 64.2 million MSMEs generated 61% of the country’s GDP or IDR 8.5 trillion in nominal value.
By 2024, the government has set a lofty goal of bringing over 30 million MSMEs into the digital economy ecosystem.
“During the pandemic, we saw that quite a many MSME business partners were affected because the shops were still offline. We launched Olsera Store to pivot their offline stores to online,” said Ali Tjin, Co-Founder and CTO of Olsera.
“On the other hand, MSMEs in the services sector also suffered loss as social distancing occurred. 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 programmes to improve their customer acquisition and retention,” he added.
