East Ventures invests in Kedai Sayur, an Indonesian startup that empowers traditional vegetable hawkers with technology

Indonesia-based ​Kedai Sayur, a startup that empowers vegetable hawkers utilising technology, announced that it has secured US$1.3 million seed funding led by East Ventures.

Kedai Sayur said that the investment will be used to accelerate its mission, which is to onboard more vegetable hawkers as their partner.

Kedai Sayur translates to “Vegetable Kiosk” in Indonesian and just established in late 2018, founded by former Deputy Director for Business Process and IT of Triputra Group, Adrian Hernanto, along with Ahmad Supriyadi and Rizki Novian.

There are two types of vegetable grocers in Indonesia; one is a typical kiosks style that provides fresh produce for the walk-in customer and another is a hawkers-style that use handcarts, selling their fresh produce door-to-door.

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The journey of fresh produce itself begins with farmers pool their products to multiple aggregators. Aggregators will then distribute it to several vendors at the central market and met with hawkers every midnight who intend to resell them to customers in a residential area.

The long process causes the products price to be multiplied, leaving hawkers with low-quality products and low profit margin, even with customers completely relying on vegetable hawkers to get their daily fresh produce.

Kedai Sayur eliminates the long process by working with several farmers and partners directly for product sourcing and distribution. Vegetable hawkers who joined Kedai Sayur as partner (called Mitra Sayur) can access these products in one-click through Kedai Sayur apps and pick them up from the nearest grocer’s drop-off points.

Kedai Sayur also offers their partners with a new kind of delivery vehicles called “Si Komo” (stands for Kedai on Mobile) that can help them to reach their door-to-door customer and to utilise it for other services such as delivering packages or selling foods to have additional income.

Kedai Sayur also provides financing program for partners who have limited capital to purchase the vehicle.

“We seek to empower fresh produce market and prove that the grassroots economy like the vegetable hawkers can also feel the benefit of technology inclusion. We trust our mission will improve hawker’s overall life as we free them from working odd hours and open multiple potentials of revenue streams,” said Adrian Hernanto, CEO of Kedai Sayur.

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To date, Kedai Sayur has more than 2,000 vegetable hawkers joining as their partner in Greater Jakarta area and the number continues to grow by 60 per cent month-on-month. 80 per cent of the partners actively sell their products and the company’s gross merchandise value (GMV) grew by 5x in the last four months.

“Kedai Sayur fits into two of East Ventures hypothesis. The first one, technology inclusion to upgrade the underserved merchant accessing technology and second, improvement of Indonesia supply chain. There is local wisdom that helps traditional on-demand vegetable hawker to exist for so long and we want to preserve that culture with a touch of technology,” closed Willson Cuaca, the Managing Partner of East Ventures.

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