Inside Jeff Bezos’ first investment in Indonesian e-commerce

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made his first expenditure in a Southeast Asian e-commerce commence-up previous month.

But it truly is in not one of the region’s billion-dollar unicorns. It’s in a mom-and-pop store start out-up that’s been all over for fewer than two decades.

And its founders? Some of Bezos’ former workforce.

“It was incredibly fortunate and a big admirer boy instant for me,” Ula CEO Nipun Mehra, 40, instructed CNBC Make It.

Founded in January 2020 by CEO Mehra, the organization has thrived less than a pandemic-induced shift to electronic, so far raising over $117 million in funding from big names like Tencent and Lightspeed Undertaking Companions.

One amid them is Bezos, whose spouse and children office environment Bezos Expeditions invested an undisclosed sum soon after a single of the begin-up’s early backers advised him about Ula.

Though Mehra has in no way fulfilled the billionaire founder, he worked less than him as a software engineer at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters prior to joining e-commerce large Flipkart in his native India.

Like Bezos, Mehra yearned to be an entrepreneur. But it was not until eventually several years later on, even though working as an investor at Sequoia India, that he noticed an opportunity to adapt the traditional e-commerce model for a new market place: small food kiosks in Indonesia. 

“The regular Amazon, Flipkart — or here in Southeast Asia we have Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia and so on — has been more on the non-food stuff side. Food stuff is a incredibly various way of managing issues,” said Mehra.

“Normally in rising economies, their income profile is these types of that they have to buy regularly and in modest baskets. The minute you get into that dynamic, the conventional way of executing e-commerce does not operate. You are not able to provide a three-, 4-, 5-dollar basket to somebody’s dwelling and do it profitably … so you have to uncover other techniques of executing it.”

Central to that are the country’s thousands and thousands of neighborhood kiosks, which offer quick going shopper merchandise, like drinks and packaged foods, as nicely as household objects.

They are an integral portion of society, especially in the scaled-down towns and provinces outside the capital Jakarta, accounting for nearly 3-quarters (72%) of the country’s $47 billion consumer products revenue.

But many however depend on classic means of replenishing their provides by shuttering their suppliers when they visit wholesalers to stock up wares. 

“They are essentially run by one particular or two people today, who act like people. They possess the business they need to have to procure things for them selves to market,” Abheek Anand, a handling director at Sequoia India, 1 of Ula’s buyers, told CNBC Make It.

“For them to tap into offline provide chains is really very inefficient. They have to go to the community sector, expend several hours figuring out what to get, the place to buy it from. By and massive, they are really confined by the bodily footprint that they can accessibility,” he included.

The founders responded quickly, onboarding tens of countless numbers of stallholders and expanding their team of 15 to 400 throughout Indonesia, Singapore and India. That quick advancement caught the eye of traders, supporting them to attract their to start with round of investment within six months.

“The most thrilling addition to the enterprise is Jeff Bezos, who’s invested, which is definitely nice validation for the small business. But there are a range of other truly wise people today who have joined us together the way,” mentioned Sequoia India’s Anand.