DOKU Closes 458 Billion Rupiah Funding from Apis Growth Fund II

DOKU announced the acquisition of $32 million (over 458 billion Rupiah) from Apis Growth Fund II, a private equity fund managed by Apis Partners LLP, a UK-based asset manager that supports growing financial services and fintech businesses. DOKU is Apis Partners' first portfolio in Indonesia.

DOKU is one of the subsidiaries of PT Eagle Andalan Nusantara (EAN). EAN is a joint venture owned by Emtek and Alibaba. Based on Emtek's financial report, PT Kreatif Media Karya (KMK) holds a 55% stake in EAN's grandson. Then it is sold to a third party.

The transaction caused KMK to lose control of EAN and subsequently KMK stopped consolidating EAN's financial statements into the Group's consolidated financial statements.

Fresh funds will be used DOCK to accelerate the development of new offerings for businesses and consumers, as well as to expand the company's geographic reach in providing access to digital payments for Indonesians.

“[..] We believe by supporting a company like DOKU, we will benefit from their proven experience. We see the collaboration with Apis Partners as a new chapter for DOKU and we are very excited to continue this partnership,” said DOKU Co-Founder and COO Nabilah Alsagoff during a virtual press conference, Thursday (5/8).

Separately in an official statement, Apis Partners Managing Partner and Co-Founder Matteo Stefanel said, “We are delighted to partner with DOKU in Apis Partners' first investment in Indonesia, which reflects our trust in this country as an investment location. We are delighted to be working with a team that has built a market-leading organization [..],” he said.

Globally, Apis Partners has a number of startup portfolios payment gateway, such as EPS (India), DPO (Africa), GHL (Malaysia), Adumo (South Africa), and Codapay (Singapore).

DOKU Performance

DOKU was founded in 2007 as the only digital payment player in Indonesia with the most complete payment licenses, ranging from fund transfers, e-walletand e-money to customers. The company also has a remittance license, has collaborated with partners in neighboring countries to facilitate transfers between countries.

In the last year alone, DOKU processed 47 million transactions with a total processed value of $2,9 billion. One of the reasons for this increase in transactions was the purchase of game vouchers because many people had to stay at home. Furthermore, it also comes from online transportation payments, the result of DOKU's collaboration with Maxim.

“Game shopping recorded an interesting increase, one of which was because we had to stay at home. For that we are intensifying partnerships with game publishers, such as Unipin, there is Google Play, TikTok will be coming soon live, and Facebook for ad spending,” added DOKU CMO Himelda Renuat.

Other interesting data is the surge in newly registered QRIS merchants by 1583% YOY and an increase of more than 30% for the retail, game, and digital content merchant categories.

DOKU's main business is payment gateway which contributes as much as 70% to the total service. Apart from that, DOKU's other businesses are Collaborative Commerce (DOKU Wallet) and Transfer Service (remittance and disbursement).

Last April, company announces rebrand for business payment gatewayIt became "Jokul" so that users from all business circles would know more, be it corporations, startups, MSMEs, to individual sellers. Jokul is a slang word in the 90s that means “to sell”. It is said that more than 5 thousand businesses have registered as organic merchants.

Service big market payment gateway

According to research conducted by Mordor Intelligence, the global payment gateway service market has touched $17,2 billion in 2020. It is projected that it will grow to $42,9 billion by 2026.

In Indonesia itself, there are several players who provide related services, helping digital businesses to accommodate payments. Among them are Midtrans, Faspay, Xendit, and others.

The potential is still very large, considering that consumers in Indonesia have varied choices for payment systems online-his. According to a service conducted by iPrice and Jakpat last year, bank transfer still dominates, followed by e-wallet and other payments.

Service role payment gateway is to provide simplification for developers. Instead of having to do manual integration one by one for each payment system, they can use ready-made services by connecting APIs payment gateway into the backend application.