A typical wholesaler still uses pen and paper to record transactions of over 300 retailers on a daily basis and manages informal credit manually, which makes the day-to-day extremely laborious. These under-digitized processes end up inconveniencing both wholesalers and retailers, resulting in lost time that could be used on increasing sales and expanding their businesses. With over an estimated 200K+ wholesalers serving about 60 million retailers in Indonesia, which make up approximately 60% of the country’s GDP, this is a massive pain point.
Today, we are excited to announce our investment in CrediBook. The team aims to mitigate this problem by digitizing bookkeeping and operating system solutions for wholesalers, paving the way for easier business management available at their fingertips. Based on the number of annual sales generated by MSMEs (all sectors excluding agricultural) in Indonesia, the estimated market size for MSMEs is around US$260 billion. That’s no small number, and it is largely attributed to Indonesia’s downstream retail chain, mostly involving commerce between wholesalers and retailers.
This is where CrediBook comes in. With its digitization of the bookkeeping process, CrediBook opens up a digital operating system with the wholesaler at the center of the product. This helps cut down on time and inefficiencies massively. With its two main features, CrediBook, and the recently launched CrediMart, the company solves three main pain points for wholesalers – bookkeeping organization, access to financing, and business expansion. While CrediBook facilitates digital bookkeeping, CrediMart acts as the online ordering operating system, enabling end-to-end selling processes from wholesalers to retailers, including BNPL options and logistics solutions.
Since its launch in 2020, CrediBook has onboarded over 500+ active wholesalers and 22,000+ active retailers onto the platform. It has also shown real and relevant results to wholesalers – a 5% increase in average daily sales with its payment collections reminder and data organization, and a 20% increase in sales by enabling wholesalers to access more retailers on the platform. What’s exciting is that while CrediMart is pretty new, having launched only in 2021, it is already seeing strong signs of early product-market fit. It has seen a 37.5x growth in GMV in six months’ time and an improved retention for wholesalers by 5x.
We are excited to back Gabriel Frans, Christian Lie, Dekha Anggareksa, and the CrediBook team on their journey. The team has demonstrated a deep passion for creating value for MSMEs. We believe that the team’s thoughtful approach, coupled with their strategic vision and strong operational executions, will help them to capture the existing market opportunity and build a sustainable business in the long run.
The founders - a formidable force - bring their experiences and skillsets to this space, and have joined forces, each bringing their unique skill-sets. Gabriel brings his product knowledge, Christian his operations expertise having spent years on the field, and Dekha his technical knowledge from the many years spent in tech development, including his previous startup in the MSME space.
We were particularly impressed by the team’s agility to continuously think of relevant solutions for wholesalers and, thereby, retailers. CrediMart helps with access to financing and business growth opportunities for wholesalers, while staying asset-light. They were also able to form a sustainable customer journey flywheel by balancing CrediBook as the entry point and CrediMart as the retention tool.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to embark on this mission along with them. With the funding, CrediBook is gearing up to expand its solutions to more areas and more product categories within the MSME space in Indonesia. CrediBook together with our portfolio companies (Ninja Van and Logisly in logistics and Dagangan in social commerce), will be a force of nature in empowering the broader MSME sector in Indonesia and beyond.