Billionaire Jeff Bezos provides an injection of funds for startups built by
Indonesian millennials. This is Founder Amazon's first investment in
Southeast Asian e-commerce. Here's the story.
The unicorn that was given this fund was less than two years old, his name
was Ula. One of the founders is a former Bezos employee.
"So lucky and an amazing fan boy moment for me," Ula CEO Nipun Mehra, 40,
told CNBC Make It when asked about the funding, as reported by Friday
(1/28/2022).
Founded in January 2020 by CEO Mehra, the company has thrived under the
shift caused by the pandemic to digital.
So far, they have raised more than USD 117 million or around IDR 1.6
trillion in funding from big names like Tencent and Lightspeed Venture
Partners.
One of them is Bezos Expeditions which invested a large amount of
undisclosed funds. Bezos decided to put funds in Ula after one of the
start-up's early backers told him about the startup.
Although Mehra had never met the billionaire founder, he worked under him as
a software engineer at Amazon's Seattle headquarters before joining
e-commerce giant Flipkart in his home country of India.
Like Bezos, Mehra also wants to be an entrepreneur. But it was only years
later, while working as an investor in Sequoia India, that he saw an
opportunity to adapt the traditional e-commerce model to a new market namely
small food kiosks in Indonesia.
Mehra started contacting friends who work in e-commerce to help her realize
her vision. There was his former colleague from Amazon, Alan Wong, Riky
Tenggara from Lazada, and Procter & Gamble executive Derry Sakti who
later completed the founding team.
"We've learned all these things at Amazon, we've learned all these things in
business school. How do we bring some of it into this little smartphone and
help them both make more money and save more money," he said.
