Prosus has taken part in a R1.3bn funding round for an e-commerce platform in Indonesia. It is part of SA’s biggest company by market value’s strategy to bet on start-up companies it deems to have long-term growth potential.
Ula, an e-commerce marketplace in Indonesia, said it had raised $87m (R1.305bn) in a series B funding round co-led by Prosus’s venture capital arm, Chinese internet giant Tencent and US investment firm B-Capital.
The start-up is a wholesale e-commerce marketplace that uses technology to connect buyers and sellers in retail, now servicing more than 70,000 store owners in Indonesia.
Founded in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ula is said to have grown 230 times, offering more than 6,000 products on its platform, and is one of the fastest-growing start-ups of its kind in the region, with teams spread across three countries.
The company says the funds will be used to “invest in growing Ula’s presence across Indonesia and exploring international expansion across South East Asia, adding new categories, expanding the buy-now-pay-later offering, as well as building new technology and a local supply chain and logistics infrastructure”.
As part of the round, Ula also received funds from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, together with Southeast Asian funds Northstar group, AC Ventures and Citius.
The latest fundraise comes eight months after its Series A round in January, which raised $20m.
Sachin Bhanot, head of Southeast Asia investments at Prosus Ventures, said: “Ula’s team is laser-focused on revolutionising Indonesia’s retail supply chain and driving financial inclusion through combining modern retail technology with the low cost, local structure of traditional retail.”
“Taking a customer-first approach, the company has demonstrated robust growth while maintaining best in class metrics. We are excited about the impact they will have and to support them in their mission,” said Bhanot in a statement.
Prosus, which is primarily invested in online classifieds, fintech, food delivery and education, did not say how much it invested in the round. Prosus is an Amsterdam-listed division of Naspers, which has transformed itself from a newspaper publisher via private-equity style investments in e-commerce platforms including an early bet in Tencent, China’s biggest internet company, which now drives the company’s fortunes.
The group has been working to beef up its investment in South East Asia.
The Ula investment follows last week’s announcement that the venture unit had participated in a $570m fundraise for Meesho, India’s fastest growing internet commerce platform, just one of the many deals that the company has embarked on in recent months.
Back in August, the group made its largest acquisition to date, pouring $4.7bn into BillDesk, a payments provider based in India.
Prosus has a large cash pile, raked in through the reduction of its $200bn stake in Tencent. The latest share sale, which netted the company almost $15bn, came in April 2021, giving it enough M&A budget to compete in the e-commerce industry dominated by deep-pocketed Silicon Valley giants.
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