Before Mamikos was a company, it was a side project that three coworkers worked on after their day jobs. Maria Regina Anggit Tut Pinilih was employed at an outsourcing software firm when she and two colleagues began building something for a problem she kept seeing in Yogyakarta: friends who could not find a room.
Yogyakarta is a student city. Every year thousands arrive with a bag and an address on a scrap of paper, and the search for a kos, a boarding room, was done on foot. You walked the lanes, read the handwritten signs taped to gates, and knocked. Listings were scattered and disorganised. Anggit has described the gap as one that hit students, college students and young workers alike.
What almost nobody expected was that the hard customer was not the student but the landlord.
The team was small. Bayu Syerli Rahmad handled operations and marketing, Gilbok Lee the technology, and Anggit led. They launched in November 2015. The name is a blend that stuck: Mami, as in a mother who looks after her tenants, plus kos.
Building the app was the easy part. What almost nobody expected was that the hard customer was not the student but the landlord. Boarding owners in 2015 did not use apps, and many had no reason to trust three young people who said a platform would fill their empty rooms faster. So the team did what apps rarely do. They went to the owners one by one, house by house. Money was thin, which pushed them to improvise instead of buy attention. And Anggit has said she met scepticism as a woman founder in a field dominated by men.
It slowly worked. Owners who listed saw rooms fill, and told other owners. In 2018 a small seed of roughly US$749k was reported, and in 2019 Alpha JWC Ventures was among the investors who backed the company to build technology and widen its reach beyond Java's student towns.
The next move was bolder. Finding a room was only half of what a boarding owner needed. So Mamikos added tools to manage tenants and payments, and later began operating rooms itself under the Mamirooms brand. By early 2022 the company reported around 150,000 owners and service in about 300 cities, with six to eight million people searching each month.
The price of growth in property is that the business gets heavier. A listing site is light; a room you manage has furniture, cleaners and a lease. Competitors with larger funding chased the same tenants.
What Anggit's story gives a first-time founder is a quiet lesson. She did not quit and bet everything on day one. She started where she stood, inside a job, with two colleagues and a problem she could see in her own friends' faces, and she earned the trust of the people who held the keys, one door at a time.