Before Dimas Harry Priawan joined Endeavor's elite network, a board member gave him an unglamorous piece of advice. During his 2021 selection panel, Raoul Oberman suggested he upgrade his camera and lighting. The pitch mattered, but so did how it looked on screen.
It was a small, human note about a founder who had learned to work with less. Priawan started Dekoruma in 2015 with Aruna Harsa, an online marketplace for people squeezed into smaller urban homes. The idea was that decorating, buying furniture and hiring a designer should happen in one place. It was a good idea in a market where several well-funded rivals had the same one.
In his own words to Endeavor, the rule was to play your own game and not be distracted by what others were doing.
For four years, from 2015 to 2019, Dekoruma had relatively little money compared with those rivals, and raising more was hard. Investors including BeeNext and Convergence Ventures backed an early round in 2016, and Blibli's investing arm and AddVentures came in for a Series B in 2018. But the competition spent faster.
Priawan chose not to chase them. In his own words to Endeavor, the rule was to play your own game and not be distracted by what others were doing. That meant building things the marketplaces did not offer: custom-made furniture, a private label, and in 2019 a physical showroom, the Dekoruma Experience Center in Kebayoran Baru. A customer who touches a sofa buys differently from one who scrolls past it.
The approach attracted bigger cheques. A pre-Series C round from InterVest followed in 2020, and in 2021 Dekoruma announced a US$15 million Series C, about Rp216.8 billion, saying it had reached positive EBITDA and planned an IPO. The IPO never came. Instead, in 2024 Blibli Group bought 99.83 percent of its Series C shares in a deal reported at Rp1.16 trillion.
Priawan still mentors other founders through Endeavor's Scale Up programme, and the point he passes on is the one that kept his company alive in the lean years.
A scarce budget can feel like a verdict, but it can also be a filter. Without the money to match rivals, Dekoruma had to pick a different fight, and the different fight turned out to be the one worth buying.