Before Pluang had a logo, it had a classroom. Claudia Kolonas and Richard Chua met at Harvard Business School as section mates, and the company's story starts there.
Kolonas did not arrive at that classroom as a novice. For more than a decade she had worked inside Indonesian financial services at Celebes Capital, a venture fund that invested in banks and other financial institutions. She had seen from the inside who got served by Indonesian finance and who did not. The rich had brokers. The rest had a savings book and gold jewellery.
Then the pandemic pushed Indonesia's retail investing into a boom, and the funding followed the users.
That last detail became the product. Pluang launched in 2019 with gold, the asset that Indonesians already treat as savings. The idea was to let anyone buy a sliver of it from a phone. Not a complex derivative, not a stock tip, just a familiar thing in a new, smaller package.
The first money was modest. A Series A of about US$3m in 2019 funded a small team and a licence-hungry start. Then the pandemic pushed Indonesia's retail investing into a boom, and the funding followed the users. In March 2021, a US$20m pre-Series B came from Openspace Ventures with Gojek's venture arm joining in. By September, Square Peg had led a US$35m Series B. In January 2022 Accel added US$55m, and the Series B reached US$110m. Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin was listed among the investors, an odd detail for a gold app that had since added crypto.
The broadening was the real strategy and the real risk. Gold bought the trust, but US stocks and crypto drew heavier regulation and sharper cycles. When crypto fell from its 2021 peak, apps that leaned on it felt the cold. Pluang's later US$10m round, led by MUFG Innovation Partners, came with a move into local Indonesian equities, a more conventional and safer base.
The shape of the bet is simple. Start where people already are, with something they already hold, and expand only once trust is earned.
For a first-time founder the quiet lesson is Kolonas's own: a decade of watching how money works for customers who rarely get a seat at the table is worth more than a clever app. She built the app for the customer she had spent ten years watching.