Inside Jeff Bezos’ first investment in Indonesian e-commerce

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made his initial investment in a Southeast Asian e-commerce commence-up last month.

But it’s in not one of the region’s billion-greenback unicorns. It can be in a mother-and-pop store begin-up that’s been all over for fewer than two years.

And its founders? Some of Bezos’ former employees.

“It was incredibly fortunate and a massive lover boy minute for me,” Ula CEO Nipun Mehra, 40, advised CNBC Make It.

Founded in January 2020 by CEO Mehra, the enterprise has thrived underneath a pandemic-induced change to electronic, so far raising over $117 million in funding from major names like Tencent and Lightspeed Undertaking Partners.

One amongst them is Bezos, whose family place of work Bezos Expeditions invested an undisclosed sum soon after one particular of the start-up’s early backers explained to him about Ula.

Nevertheless Mehra has hardly ever fulfilled the billionaire founder, he worked beneath him as a software engineer at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters right before becoming a member of e-commerce large Flipkart in his indigenous India.

Like Bezos, Mehra yearned to be an entrepreneur. But it was not until a long time later, although working as an trader at Sequoia India, that he saw an chance to adapt the traditional e-commerce model for a new market: small food kiosks in Indonesia. 

“The common Amazon, Flipkart — or here in Southeast Asia we have Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia and so on — has been additional on the non-foodstuff aspect. Foodstuff is a pretty various way of managing factors,” said Mehra.

“Ordinarily in emerging economies, their income profile is this sort of that they have to buy usually and in smaller baskets. The moment you get into that dynamic, the conventional way of undertaking e-commerce isn’t going to work. You cannot provide a three-, four-, five-greenback basket to somebody’s dwelling and do it profitably … so you have to come across other techniques of executing it.”

Central to that are the country’s hundreds of thousands of neighborhood kiosks, which provide quickly relocating consumer merchandise, like drinks and packaged foods, as properly as residence merchandise.

They are an integral section of society, especially in the lesser towns and provinces outside the capital Jakarta, accounting for practically a few-quarters (72%) of the country’s $47 billion consumer products gross sales.

Nonetheless numerous even now depend on classic means of replenishing their supplies by shuttering their retailers when they visit wholesalers to inventory up wares. 

“They are essentially run by one or two persons, who act like customers. They have the business they need to procure things for on their own to market,” Abheek Anand, a taking care of director at Sequoia India, one of Ula’s investors, advised CNBC Make It.

“For them to tap into offline provide chains is basically very inefficient. They have to go to the regional current market, expend several hours figuring out what to obtain, wherever to get it from. By and big, they are quite constrained by the bodily footprint that they can obtain,” he extra.

The founders responded quickly, onboarding tens of hundreds of stallholders and expanding their team of 15 to 400 across Indonesia, Singapore and India. That quick growth caught the eye of investors, encouraging them to attract their initially round of expense within six months.

“The most interesting addition to the enterprise is Jeff Bezos, who’s invested, which is definitely wonderful validation for the enterprise. But there are a selection of other seriously intelligent people today who have joined us along the way,” explained Sequoia India’s Anand.