MAKMUR Raises Seed Funding for Investment App for Indonesians

MAKMUR has raised a seven-digit figure in a seed funding round for its Indonesia-based investment app.

The platform is the brainchild of Sander Parawira, a Stanford University’s graduate, formerly the Head of Quantitative Strategies of Wall Street’ leading quantitative trading firm, Virtu Financial. Prior to Virtu, Sander was a Software Engineer at Facebook.

The fundraise was led by BEENEXT, with participation from Kinesys Group, Trihill Capital, Yiping Goh (Quest Ventures’ partner), Edward Tirtanata (Kopi Kenangan’s CEO), Vidit Agrawal (GajiGesa’s CEO), and Andrew Lee (former unicorn executive),

MAKMUR will use the capital to expand its features and product portfolio, as well as to hire new talented individuals and people development.

The investment app takes inspiration from US-based app Betterment as it helps users set their financial goals and reach them through long-term investing.

Similar to Betterment, MAKMUR has goal-based investing feature so users can easily invest towards multiple goals, such as emergency fund, retirement fund, and children’s education fund with the ease of using just one app.

Additionally, the app features a Robo Advisory tool that can be tweaked for risk tolerance, investment horizon, and prevailing economic conditions.

The investment app is MAKMUR’s way to digitize and democratize financial advisory in an accessible and affordable solution for all Indonesians.

Sander Parawira, founder and CEO of MAKMUR, said: “Many people think that investing in mutual funds is difficult, in which they have to go through a complicated account opening process and prepare a large amount of capital. Supported by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and face recognition technology, we offer an exceptional account opening experience that is simple and swift. It only takes five minutes to complete the account opening process, with an initial capital starting from IDR 10,000 (USD 0.70) and no transaction fee.”

“Indonesia’s capital market investor has experienced a significant growth, however, the number of investors today in Indonesia is still fewer than 2% of the population. Following the seed funding round, we are hoping to bridge the financial inclusion gap while improving financial literacy across the country”, Sander added.

Faiz Rahman, BEENEXT’s partner, commented: “We are witnessing a new revolution in Indonesia where mass market come to realize the importance of investing. MAKMUR enables retail investors to do prudent long-term investing to build wealth sustainably. We are very excited about MAKMUR and we look forward to having a long-term partnership with MAKMUR as we believe in their mission to make investing easier, cheaper, and more sustainable for Indonesians.”

MAKMUR is focused on improving financial literacy and inclusion among Indonesian citizens. The firm has obtained a license from Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (OJK) in February 2021 and partnered with ten leading investment managers.