With technology set to add trillions to the Indonesian economy over the next two decades, and with the Indonesian government creating a legislative and regulatory environment designed to accelerate growth, the nation's entrepreneurs are innovating across a wide selection of industries.

We’ve picked six from the e-commerce, travel, logistics, and fintech sectors that demonstrate the depth of expertise and opportunity in the archipelago.

GoTo (Gojek and Tokopedia IPO)

Indonesia’s biggest tech firm, formed out of the merger of e-commerce pioneer Tokopedia and regional ride-sharing startup Gojek last year, surprised many with its plans for an IPO in the middle of turbulent global market conditions. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and slow post-COVID recoveries in many developed economies have resulted in a few IPOs being put on hold. In the end, though, it’s smiles all around — interest from local investors ensured that the IPO raised around $1.1 billion and left the group with a valuation of almost $30 billion. That’s roughly 40x the company’s projected revenue for 2022 of around $770 million, leading to some optimism that the market may not be as moribund as feared. Backers like SoftBank and Alibaba have had their faith rewarded.

More importantly, a range of other Indonesian startups are known to be eyeing the market with renewed confidence.

J&T Express – logistics

Launched in 2015 and named for its two founders, Jet Lee and Tony Chen (both formerly of Oppo), J&T has grown rapidly to become the dominant logistics player in Southeast Asia. It expanded into Malaysia and Vietnam, followed by The Philippines and Thailand, then Singapore and Cambodia. Finally it reached the big one — China — in March 2020 and shortly thereafter announced a valuation of $7.8 billion. Timing has been kind to the company, with a COVID-driven boom in e-commerce making logistics very much the flavour of the month for the past several years.

Now, with the world struggling to overcome supply-chain difficulties — just the sort of thing a logistics company can help with — J&T is looking to an IPO. A funding round late last year injected $2.5 billion into the coffers with interest from the likes of Boyu Capital, Hillhouse Capital Group, Sequoia Capital and Tencent, pushing the company’s value up over $20 billion and placing it just behind GoTo among Indonesia’s unicorns.

Bukalapak - E-commerce

Indonesia’s fourth-largest e-commerce player Bukalapak enjoyed a moment in the Sun last August when its IPO raised $1.5 billion — the biggest to date for an Indonesian startup. But that moment didn’t last long as commentators began to question how the company would scale to compete with rivals like GoTo or regional competitors including Singaporean superapp Grab. By the end of 2021 the stock had fallen 60 percent and the CEO, Rachmat Kaimuddin, resigned. Kaimuddin had been credited with bringing large investors into the fold, including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, China’s Ant Group, Microsoft, Standard Chartered bank and South Korean web portal Naver, among others.

Over 70 percent of Bukalapak’s revenue comes from Mitra Bukalapak, essentially an affiliate program roughly analogous to Amazon Marketplace. Bukalapak’s Mitras — partners — are found among the thousands of warungs (small family-owned businesses),  found all over Indonesia. In the first quarter this year Mitra Bukalapak grew by 227 percent year over year, contributing to 86 percent growth for the company as a whole.

Ovo – fintech

Digital wallet firm Ovo, which built itself on the promise of getting 92 million Indonesians access to banking services, was one of the country’s first unicorns when it crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark in 2019. As with Bukalapak, which has found growth by tapping into Indonesia’s many warungs, Ovo has found a rich vein in partnership with what it calls MSMEs, or micro and small to medium enterprises. By acting as a digital gateway to business banking and investment services for extremely small businesses, Ovo has generated revenue growth with sheer scale.

In 2018 Ovo partnered with Singaporean unicorn Grab to handle digital payments, and in 2021 Grab acquired ownership of the shares in Ovo that had been owned by Tokopedia before its merger with Gojek to form GoTo (which has its own digital wallet, GoPay). Grab now owns nearly 80 percent of Ovo.

Xendit – fintech

Fintech Xendit, founded in 2016, hit unicorn status last year when its Series C funding round brought in $150 million. Now the fastest-growing fintech in Indonesia has just completed a Series D round worth another $300 million. This brings its total raised to around $538 million. It claims to have over 3,000 customers and over the past year tripled its transaction value from $65 million to $200 million. Xendit intends to use the money raised in the latest funding round to expand into new territories including Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. It is already one of the largest payment platforms in the Philippines, having expanded there last year with an investment in local fintech DragonPay.

Traveloka - travel

Traveloka is Indonesia’s dominant online travel agency. Valued recently at US$3bn, and with its app downloaded 60m times, the company claims to have 40m active monthly users.

Backed by a who’s who of investors including the Qatar Investment Authority and fellow OTA Expedia, Traveloka was reportedly contemplating a US SPAC merger in 2021. Given the success of GoTo’s IPO on the Jakarta Exchange, and with travel now rising rapidly from the ashes, Traveloka will surely seek its own liquidity event.