Go-Jek, one of the largest startups in Indonesia, is leveraging Indian engineering talent and has set up a new engineering facility in Bengaluru.
The facility would have both Indian and Indonesian engineers and would become a training centre for the company’s engineering team. There would also be developers, data scientists, designers and product managers who work on product innovation and mining data among other things.
The Jakarta based company wants to scale its operations and extend its offerings to its customers in Indonesia by using Indian engineering talent.
Go-Jek has also been on an acquisition spree in India and had recently made its fourth Indian acquisition in the form of Leftshift, a Pune-based mobile app developing company that specialises in designing and engineering mobile applications for startups such as BookMyShow and Walnut.
Interestingly, Go-Jek, which was founded in 2010 by a Harvard Business School alumni— an Indonesian named Nadiem Makarim—started off as a call centre company. However, today it has come a long way and has now specialised as an App based company with over 25 million downloads.
This startup offers online bike and taxi service in 15 cities in Indonesia. In addition to this, Go-Jek has diversified into providing different services, including food delivery, courier and logistics, grocery delivery, cleaning, massage service, beauty and lifestyle, automotive service and pharmaceutical delivery service.
In August 2016, Go-Jek had raised over $550 million in a new round of funding led by KKR and Warburg Pincus LLC, which was one of the largest for an Indonesian technology startup. The company is also backed by Sequoia Capital India, and DST Global.
“Our Bengaluru engineering centre will help us improve the daily lives of more than 250,000 motorcycle and car driver partners, more than 35,000 Go-Food merchants whose businesses we helped grow and more than 3,000 service providers on our other on-demand services in Indonesia. Our Indian acquisitions were a perfect fit as far as our strategy is concerned and they have helped us in scaling up our operations and offering better services to our customers. We will always be on the look out for new acquisitions and if any company fits our strategy we may acquire it in the future,” Makarim told THE WEEK
Off late, the company is witnessing increased popularity of its app in Indonesia. “The sheer size of Indonesia and the steady increase in the number of smart phone users in the country presents before us a huge potential for growth. We will continue to offer our services in Indonesia and will not venture out in any other market as of now. However, in order to grow and to cater to this large Indonesian population, we need to scale up further which can come only through technology. Indonesian and Indian engineers will collaborate and work together to develop our technology offerings further,” remarked Piotr Jakubowski, chief marketing officer, Go-Jek
