The company that would one day sell for roughly US$120 million was named after a drink. In 2014, two friends sat over coffee in Jakarta and talked about small businesses that still ran on paper notebooks. Both loved mocha. They called the idea Moka.
Haryanto Tanjo was born in Medan in 1989. He left Indonesia for the University of California, Berkeley at 18 and studied industrial engineering and operations research. The jobs that followed read like a young consultant's checklist: a manufacturing engineer at Bayer, project work at Cisco, a spell at a small San Francisco consultancy, an MBA at UCLA, then McKinsey in Jakarta. He knew how to find inefficiency. He had spent years being paid to do it for other people.
Tanjo has said the biggest challenge was market education: merchants did not doubt they were busy, they doubted that software would help them.
His friend Grady Laksmono, whom he knew from their college days in the United States, was the engineer. What they saw in Indonesia was a gap. Tens of millions of small merchants had no bank relationship worth speaking of and kept their accounts by hand. A point-of-sale app on a tablet could give a warung or cafe an instant record of what sold. Tanjo walked away from his job in 2014 and registered the company in August.
Then came the part nobody puts in a pitch deck. Selling it was slow. Tanjo has said the biggest challenge was market education: merchants did not doubt they were busy, they doubted that software would help them. East Ventures wrote an early seed cheque, and the team spent its days in shops, showing owners the thing instead of describing it.
What made it work was focus. Moka did not try to be a bank first. It became the register, and once the register worked, payments, loans and reports could sit on top of it. By 2018 Sequoia India and Southeast Asia led a US$24 million Series B, with SoftBank Ventures Korea and Singapore's EDBI alongside, taking total funding to about US$28 million. A year later Tanjo was on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.
The ending was a handoff. Gojek, hunting for the merchants that fed its ecosystem, agreed to buy the company, and the deal closed in 2020 at a reported value near Rp2 trillion, a figure Gojek never confirmed. Moka's tools were folded into the GoBiz merchant app, and Tanjo moved into a commerce role at GoTo Financial.
The lesson for a first-time founder is how small the first idea was. Two friends, one coffee, one observation about paper ledgers. The work was not the idea. It was months of standing in shops, explaining what a tablet could do, until enough owners believed it that a giant needed them.