New startup accelerator, Scaleopens its doors in Jakarta. It is a joint project between Salim Group’s Innovation Factory – a corporation for Block71 Jakarta – and the investment company Gree Ventures.
Skala will invest $30,000 in each startup it selects in exchange for a five percent stake. At the top of the three-month program, the startups will present themselves to investors at a demo day. Gree Ventures may determine to take a position in people who graduate from the accelerator.
“We’ve invested in Y Combinator-backed companies and learned how fundamental change can come from leading a few companies,” explains Gree Ventures CEO Nikhil Kapur.
“We looked around and couldn’t find any other program that did this in Indonesia, so we decided to collaborate on our own project.”
Skala can even provide office space, legal and accounting support, and cloud hosting credits. It is in search of startup teams with strong expertise and a deep understanding of the local market. Foreign startups are welcome to use so long as their product supports Indonesia.
The teams should ideally have done prior customer development and are starting to check product-market fit. Having a minimum viable product with some traction is a plus. While Skala considers all sectors, she is especially interested by agritech, supply chain and logistics, healthtech, educationtech, media, financialtech, and online-to-offline e-commerce.
Startups have until September 14 to use. The program starts the primary week of October this 12 months.
Kapur and Gree Ventures investment manager Samir Chaibi might be operating partners at Skala, alongside Innovation Factory CEO and PopBox CEO Adrian Lim and AWS Indonesia startup ecosystem lead Budiman Wikarsa.
Source : Technology in Asia
