Indonesia’s mico-retail tech startup Warung Pintar has recently announced that it has acquired Bizzy Digital, an integrated B2B eCommerce firm in a deal worth US$45 million.
Despite this being an acquisition, Bizzy Digital will still remain a separate entity as a brand and organization.
Instead, the deal is more focused on bringing together Warung Pintar from the demand-side and Bizzy Digital from the supply-side to create a full-stack supply chain platform.
“As Bizzy Digital becomes part of Warung Pintar, there will be no other player as integrated up and down the supply chain,” said Andrew Mawikere, the CEO of Bizzy Digital. “The combination will enable us to serve brands and distributors with unprecedented value-added, data-driven strategy at scale.”
Specifically, this partnership combines Warung Pintar’s front-end retail digitalization strengths with Bizzy’s supply chain capabilities in FMCG distribution, creating a strong synergy and efficiency for Indonesia’s mom and pops stores.
Agung Bezharie, the CEO and Co-founder of Warung Pintar commented on the deal, saying that “Through this acquisition, we hope to change the digital distribution approach in the field, which currently relies heavily on promotions and discounts for customer acquisition.”
He further added that “having Bizzy Digital as part of the bigger Warung Pintar ecosystem will enable us to guarantee product reliability, availability, and fair pricing by working directly with the brand’s distributors.”
This will support Warung Pintar’s plan to build deeper connections with shop owners through payment services.
Following this acquisition, Warung Pintar will also gain access to a combined pool of 600 brands and serve 230,000 retailers in 65 cities across Indonesia. Not to mention, a larger shareholder foundation to support growth moving forward.
Founded in 2017, Warung Pintar to date has raised a total of US$35.5 million in funding capital from backers and investors including East Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Pavilion Capital, Line Ventures, OVO, SMDV, and Agaeti among some.
The retail tech startup had also last acquired Limakilo, a food supply chain platform connecting farmers to food stalls and vendors back in 2019.
Despite the challenges of the COVID19 pandemic in 2020, Warung Pintar continues to see an increase in the numbers of retail kiosks (warung) to 60,000 in November 2020.
Moving forward for Q1 2021, Warung Pintar plans to acquire 300,000 kiosks. With this timely acquisition laying the foundation, the startup is looking to expand to all tier 2 and 3 cities across the country.
The B2B eCommerce market in Indonesia still has enormous potential and room to grow. It is expected to increase at least three times the size of startups in the B2C counterparts.