Carousell Acquihire WatchOverMe Employees, Three of them are Indonesian

Carousell, service mobile classified app from Singapore, took various strategic steps to support business growth after obtaining Series B funding of $35 million recently with product strengthening and adding technical team (engineer). Carousell fully acquires Malaysian app company WatchOverMe.acquire employees, and relocated them to Carousell's head office in Singapore.

[Read also: Carousell Books $35 Million Series B Funding]

Quek Siu Riu, Co-Founder of Carousell, explained that out of a total of nine people in the application team WatchOverMe, not all of them chose to join. Five people from the product and technical team, who came from various backgrounds, joined Carousell.

Interestingly, he continued, three of those who joined were Indonesian nationals, one from Malaysia, and the other from Ukraine.

In total, the Carousell engineer team now has eight different nationalities. Previously they had employees of Lithuanian, Indian, Taiwanese and Singaporean nationalities. One of the new engineers is a graduate of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Abraham Krisnanda.

"This is what makes him [Abraham] and the rest of the technical team so valuable, because track record its performance is well known in Singapore. They have a high passion in IT, problem solvers, and like challenges," said Quek, Wednesday (31/8).

Carousell has ambitions to build a world class team consisting of designer and engineer. According to him, the diversity of nationalities is important in serving the global community, while at the same time providing for the needs of each.

"Through acquihire or individual recruitment, they are very important in pushing Carousell to the next stage."

The technical team, he continued, will be tasked with improving Carousell's products from upgrades user experience. The focus is on simplifying the process of selling goods and attracting users to sell and buy goods.

Carousell also added one senior person in the technology industry to join the team, namely Andrius Baranaukas as Director of Product. Armed with his experience while at Vinted, marketplace for goods pre-loved, such as building Vinted community services, chat, and logistics, Adrius is expected to enhance Carousell's product capabilities as a leader in the industry mobileclassified.

The addition of a new team member brings Carousell to more than 90 employees worldwide. Quek explained Carousell's product and technical team of more than 20 people came from 8 countries.

Until the end of the year, Quek targets to double the number of teams from their current position. This means that the number of employees Carousell wants to employ could be almost 200 people.

"We are delighted to be able to talk to the team or those who are interested in solving important issues regarding technology, especially sections like machine learning, data science, and Al to update the search and community engagement."

Please note, previously WatchOverMe was an application created to help women feel safe by sending notifications to emergency contacts when they were in danger. This technology focuses on security and addresses the needs of the community. This is believed to be a strong foundation for Carousell's success.

On its website, WatchOverMe announced its disbandment as of August 31, 2016. All services owned by the application will become open source so that it can be used and distributed by many parties. WatchOverMe users have reached 250 worldwide.

Focus Carousell

Indonesia remains the main country of most interest to Carousell, especially with a population of more than 250 million people. Quek revealed that his party made several adjustments to local features starting from the use of language and currency. Besides that, interface The application is also made more simple and easy to understand.

Carousell will also continue to educate communities in Indonesia and market the ease of selling goods pre-loved.

"We invest a lot for the Indonesian market compared to other countries, because Indonesia has great potential that we can achieve."

Carousell currently has operations in 13 countries around the world, including Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia. It claims to already have more than 35 million listings globally. In terms of business growth, Carousell has grown more than 20 times since December 2014.

According to Quek, the plans for the next country to be targeted by Carousell are still under consideration. "We are still studying the next country we will target, for the time being we only added Hong Kong last July," he concluded.