In 2009, Tomy Yunus landed in Beijing and could not speak Mandarin. He was 23, and as he has told the Indonesian magazine SWA, that was the first time in his life he had really tried to learn a foreign language.
It is an odd origin for a language-learning founder, and it is the reason the company exists. Yunus enrolled at the Beijing Chinese Language and Culture Center. In the same classrooms he met Yohan Limerta, a fellow Indonesian. Both were beginners, both struggling with tones and characters, and both knew how different the experience was in China, where the language was in the street, from Indonesia, where it was in a textbook.
Cakap now offers courses for children and adults, including preparation for language proficiency certificates, with live online classes.
Yunus's background was in economics. He studied at Universitas Bina Nusantara in Jakarta and later took a master's in economics at Renmin University of China. When he looked back at Indonesia, he found something striking in a survey he conducted: only about 10 percent of Indonesians were fluent in a foreign language, usually English. The gap looked like a business.
In 2014, the two founded Squline, a platform for learning Mandarin. The name was a problem. Squline meant little to most Indonesians, and by 2019 the team wanted a name that people could remember and that sounded like their country. They chose Cakap, an Indonesian word meaning able or skilled.
The rename came with a wider scope. Cakap now offers courses for children and adults, including preparation for language proficiency certificates, with live online classes. Funding followed: US$3 million Series A+ at the end of 2020 led by Heritas Venture Fund, then a US$10 million Series B in December 2021 co-led by Centauri Fund, formed by MDI Ventures and KB Investment, and Heritas Capital. The company said it would spend on machine learning for personalised study.
The founders have since been named to Fortune Indonesia's 40 Under 40 in 2024, and EY named both finalists for Entrepreneur Of The Year Indonesia in 2025.
There is a small, human lesson in how this started. Yunus did not found Cakap because he was a gifted linguist. He built it because he had been a frightened beginner, in a foreign city, with a classmate who understood exactly how it felt.