His family thought he had lost his mind. Andi Taufan Garuda Putra was 22, an ITB graduate with a job at IBM, one of the names Indonesian parents love to say at weddings. Then in 2009 he resigned, and the new office was a village in Ciseeng, in Bogor, with rice fields on one side and a market on the other. To his family, it looked like a fall in status.
He had been working at IBM for two years. He later described the job as a way to learn management before running something of his own. What he did not say was that the job felt empty; one profile quotes him saying it lacked meaning and the will to live. A second thing pulled harder. Around Ciseeng, loan sharks, the rentenir, charged farmers and small traders interest that kept them poor. Banks did not go there.
With about Rp10m of his own savings, he started Amartha in 2010 as a Grameen-style microfinance institution. His first loans went to just five borrowers, none above Rp1m. Women formed the groups, because the idea, borrowed from Bangladesh, India and Latin America, was that shared responsibility did the work collateral could not. As he put it later, shared responsibility is the core value of Amartha.
It worked, slowly. By 2014 he had about 5,000 customers, five branches and 40 staff. But growth came with a price. His first co-founder left in 2013 because the pace was too slow. From 2014 to 2016, the model hit a wall: there was demand for roughly Rp500m in loans and he could fund only Rp200m. Borrowers drifted away.
The turn was a decision to take the lenders online. In April 2016 Amartha relaunched as a peer-to-peer fintech, letting ordinary people fund loans to village women. At the launch event, fewer than ten people showed up. Three months later, Rp10bn had been lent.
Then the numbers outran the doubts. About Rp700bn disbursed in 2018, a Series B led by LINE Ventures in late 2019, and in 2023 a US$28m round led by Women's World Banking. A 2023 profile counted about Rp1.7tn lent to more than 360,000 women, with roughly 2,300 field officers walking the villages.
There were rough patches too. In 2020, while serving as a presidential special staffer, he drew criticism for letters to district heads that appeared to promote his own company.
What the story teaches is the order of things. Taufan did not begin with an app. He began with five borrowers and a family that disapproved. The technology came six years after trust.