Anderson Sumarli studied Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and graduated summa cum laude. He joined IBM in 2014 and moved to Boston Consulting Group in 2016, where he worked as a management consultant until 2018.
In 2019 he started Ajaib with co-founder Yada Piyajomkwan. Ajaib is an app for buying stocks, mutual funds and crypto, and it had to win a licence from the regulator OJK as a brokerage and crypto app. Early investor meetings were hard, and he faced rejections before the first round closed.
The first outside round came in 2020, and he was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia that year. In 2021 Ribbit Capital led a $65 million extension. In October 2021 DST Global led a $153 million Series B that valued Ajaib above $1 billion, making it Indonesia's seventh unicorn.
Ajaib reached about two million customers in roughly three years. In 2022 Sumarli was on Fortune Indonesia's 40 Under 40 list and won an EY Young Entrepreneur Award. Retail trading slowed after the pandemic boom, and Ajaib competes with Stockbit, Bibit, Pluang and IPOT.