In the midst of many news on startup frauds, layoffs, and digital gambling damages, Indonesian Digital Startup World has certainly gained a very negative reputation. Thus it is easy to write off the entire decade of digital revolution in Indonesia as illusion at best, all-out trickery at worst, perpetrated by fraudulent founders, assisted by mad, irresponsible investors, who are all out to trick the innocent public.

But lets stop and recall what Indonesia was, digitally, before all of this. Before QRIS available everywhere, including your warung and gerobak bakso, before Gojek’s GoFood makes your family members at peace with each other’s tonight food preferences, Before Tokopedia and Shopee, Traveloka, Astro, Mamikos, and yes, P2P lending, Bibit and Ajaib, allow you to find anything you just think of, Go anywhere you want to go, find a place to live anywhere you want, and pay for all of those (as long as it is within your means), and let you be aware that there are opportunity to invest your spare cash in any stocks, gold, even crypto.

Yes, many of this business in the end are also offered by many of the big players like BCA, Mandiri, and Bluebird, but were they the fist to try it, or were they jolted awake and dragged kicking and screaming by competitors to offer these conveniences to you. Plese recall, when is the last time you go to a bank teller, to an ATM? To hail a taxi on the street. What changes have happened, just in the last decade.

Note that the same changes has happened around the world. But, unlike before where Indonesia just sit in the sideline and see the world grow, We, in the last decade, sit at the forefront of the revolution (at least the part that fits our people’s need). We have adapted the digitalization and bend it to the version that fits our way of live, our prices, our needs. and the world recognize us as the leading country when it comes to startups in Southeast Asia.

In startups, Indonesia (used to) leads. and the world notices. The StartupBlink’s 2022 and 2023 global ranking on startup ecosystem put us and our many unicorns then at 30th worldwide. and UGM own study put us at 6th globally in term of number of startups.

Kredivo, Amartha, Akulaku, Indodana has lent to millions of business and individuals in Indonesia, and this is despite the fact that these businesses, and individuals, has barely any credit history, unlike what their counterpart did worldwide. Kredivo scrapes (and verify) data from whatever bank records, e-commerce transactions, and other online activities that reflect the borrower’s ability to repay. Amartha creates and assist circles of women to support each other in learning to build rural home businesses. Together, each in their own unique, locally customized way, these players has gone where our banks refuse to go, and make the next layer of Indonesian people and SME, bankable. Yes, they make mistakes, and maybe some borrowers were just not ready to borrow money, or never intended to pay back. but these fintech innovates, takes risks, reaches out, and that is what Indonesia needs to grow.

Even if we look closely on what happened at efishery. It is not that efishery did not do any real business. or that their business does not help improve the lifelihood of the 3,000 (not 10,000) actual aquaculture farmers. It is that the business that they did is not as big, with “ONLY” IDR 2.6 Trillion of business, not the IDR 12 Trillion that they claim to their investor. Yes, the fraud did in the end hurt a lot of people, beyond their investors, because once the fact comes out, the company chose to close down the business, and thus those 3,000 farmers no longer have the support of the feed and buyer that the efishery brought them. But it is not because the idea doesn’t not work. It is because the idea was not well (and truthfully) executed by this particular team. But the idea is proven, and hopefully the next batch of founders can do it right.

We all have hear that Indonesia is big, with many part are “terbelakang” behind the reach of modernization. It faces challenges that doesn’t exist in developed countries, or even if similar problems exist in other developing nations like Philippines and Thailand, and India, our people are different, our culture and conventions and infrastructure as well. thus we need a customized local solution. thus we need Innovation. and Innovation is inherently Risky. And many innovators are bound to fail. Does this means we should stop trying?

In Gofood, initially restaurants are reluctant to take orders from gofood, fearing quality loss, competition, etc. It takes pandemic (and yes, subsidized delivery fee, and lossy margin borne by willing investors, not the public) to convince them, and convince their customers to try. Once you have such convenience at your fingertips, it is impossible to go back. Incidentally, Indonesia’s gofood prices are insanely low compared to the $10 dollar (Rp 160,000) average delivery cost of UberEATS in USA> (314 billion idr rev in 2025 q1, profitably serving 500 million merchants.)

In Tokopedia, Bukalapak, and now Shopee, millions of small (and big) sellers have successfully sold almost 20 million order daily without opening physical stores which require a year of advance rental payment and renovation before selling a single object. This has allowed many new players to enter the market (and yes, at the cost of many old players who failed to adapt). And to the customers, this means easy to find goods that they need (and that they don’t need but looks cool as they swipe away during their spare time).

In Supply Chain distribution of FMCG goods, an area admittedly no Indonesian startup have successfully (survived to) penetrated. digitalization have happened. Where before thousands of human canvasser takes orders from hundreds of thousands of wholesaler supplying the Indonesian mom-and-pop warung (and where a rainy day means big dip in orders) Now orders are being taken by WhatsApp to their upstream distributors (after tens of startup in digital supply chain fail to insert themselves). The landscape is still being rewritten here, as even this level of digitalizations will result in better efficiencies, less costs, (and yes, will need less players).

Lets finish with an anecdotal story:
Just the other month, A wall in my room sprung a leak. water flow every night and its very annoying because I can’t stop the flow of the water to plug the leak. We tried a few things, from crazy glue, to cement (which refuse to dry), to aquaproof paint (create a bubble of water underneath the paint, which eventually break). So. after those tries, we resort to chatgpt, which immediately suggest a type of cement called Waterplug (which dries in 5 min, while you hold it in place against the leak). A quick search in tokped shows Bitachem Waterplug (and a bunch of other waterplugs, but less branded) that is cheap, 46,000, deliver free onkir in two days, and just one click away. Short story. no leak. Imagine what that looks like five years ago. And many of you would have said I should have tried the AI on the first try, what was I thinking. But that exactly it. AI is just starting to be part of my daily routine. I still need to evolve, We all do.

Which brings us to the final thing. The technology revolution is not done yet. In fact, it is about to get faster with AI, Solar energy, EV bike and cars, Plastic recycling (and waste), and the list goes on. We need our own solution to this. Indonesia need to be on top of it to have any hope of reaching our Indonesia Emas 2024 dream. And for this we need our innovation, our innovators, our founders (and investors) of the next (less fraudulent) startups. Yes the startup scene need to be fixed. but we can’t abandon it.

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Written by a practitioner in Indonesia’s venture capital industry, who most recently served as the CEO of a state-owned enterprise-backed corporate venture capital (CVC).