He was 22 when he decided to ask other people for their money, and the people he asked were not impressed. Anderson Sumarli has since let slip what that felt like: investors looked at the age on his face and saw inexperience. Some said no. A few said no more than once.
He had a CV that should have settled the question. A Cornell degree in applied economics and management, finished with top honours. Two years at IBM from 2014, then two years in the grind of management consulting at Boston Consulting Group. Yada Piyajomkwan, a Thai co-founder, joined him as chief operating officer. None of it helped much in the first meetings. In a country where fewer than one in a hundred people owned a share, a young man in a T-shirt promising to bring millions of strangers into the stock market sounded like a pitch deck, not a plan.
What nobody on the other side of the table expected was how fast the audience would arrive.
Ajaib launched in 2019 with a plain idea. Stock trading in Indonesia felt like a bank counter: forms, minimums, jargon. The two founders built an app that felt closer to a messaging tool, aimed at first-time investors in their twenties. Mutual funds, stocks and, later, crypto, all in one place and all under licence from the financial regulator OJK.
That licence detail matters more than it sounds. Plenty of apps were chasing the same crowd. Ajaib's founders worked through the paperwork of an actual brokerage rather than renting someone else's rails, and then packed the product with education so a nervous beginner would not freeze on the first screen.
What nobody on the other side of the table expected was how fast the audience would arrive. The pandemic sent millions of young Indonesians home with time and a phone. In 2020 came a Series A, and in 2021 Ribbit Capital, a firm that knows consumer finance, backed a US$65m extension. By October 2021 DST Global led a US$153m Series B that pushed Ajaib past a US$1bn valuation, making it the seventh Indonesian unicorn and, by some counts, the fastest to get there at about two and a half years.
The price of a rocket start is that the ground is always moving. Retail trading cooled after the boom. Rules changed. Competitors with deeper pockets and older licences fought for the same first-time investor. The company has said it reached some two million customers within roughly three years, and by one aggregator's count it has raised about US$245m across rounds.
The lesson in Sumarli's story is smaller than the headlines. The people who said no in 2019 were not wrong to want proof. He gave them proof by shipping, not by arguing. A founder who is underestimated has one cheap advantage: nobody is watching closely, so the work gets to speak first.