Bezos Makes First-Ever Investment in Southeast Asia’s E-Commerce
Bezos Makes First-Ever Investment in Southeast Asia’s E-Commerce
The Indonesian startup Ula made headlines this week after completing its $82 million USD Series B round of funding. The round was led by Prosus Ventures, B-Capital, and Tencent (best known for the Chinese messaging app WeChat). But the investor that garnered the most attention was Jeff Bezos, who participated in the funding round via his personal investment firm, Bezos Expeditions. It was not clear from online coverage how much Bezos Expeditions invested in the funding round.
As founder and executive chairman of Amazon, Bezos is familiar with the challenges and opportunities associated with the e-commerce sector. In addition to the retail platform Amazon.com, Amazon also operates Amazon Web Services (AWS) and designs and sells a variety of smart home devices to consumers. Despite attempts to make headway in large, foreign markets like India and China, Amazon’s e-commerce arm met limited success and eventually pulled out of China altogether. Amazon has not yet entered or not yet established a significant presence in most Southeast Asian countries. Given the company’s rocky relationship with markets outside of the Americas and Europe, it is fascinating to see its founder take an interest in a Southeast e-commerce venture like Ula.
Ula is headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia and was founded in 2020. Unlike Amazon.com, Ula is a business-to-business (rather than business-to-consumer) e-commerce platform that helps micro-retailers make supply chain and inventory operations more efficient. It targets small, often individual- or family-operated local stores, or warungs, that could benefit from having a one-stop shop for inventory or source of working capital. According to TechCrunch, because these small stores often have trusting relationships with local customers, they may not always receive payment for goods at the time of purchase. This leaves stores waiting for payments before they can restock their inventory. With Ula’s services, these kinds of shopkeepers can access the capital needed to restock their inventories before receiving payments from their customers.
It is somewhat misleading (yet not surprising) that stories about Ula center on Jeff Bezos’s involvement. But news of the startup’s most recent round of funding brings attention to the ways in which existing technology, applied to local markets with their unique needs in mind, can augment rather than eclipse local businesses.
Sources:
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ula
https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/02/jeff-bezos-in-talks-to-back-indonesian-e-commerce-ula/