In 2015 a co-founder walked out and Delta Purna Widyangga, then co-CTO, was handed the chief executive job of a two-year-old chat startup. He had not planned it that way. He had planned to run the enterprise side while Evan Purnama built the product.
Delta's path to that seat was unusual for an Indonesian founder of that era. He studied electrical and electronic engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, graduating in 2009, and then took the safe route: software engineer at Accenture, then consultant at the SAP specialist ecenta AG. Neither job looked like a founder's launch pad.
Then Nordin left, and the product itself had to prove it was a business, not a feature.
What almost nobody mentions is that he was already a founder by the time Qiscus began. In 2011 he co-founded a digital agency in Singapore called 1.618, and he stayed with it until 2017, which means that for several years he was running two companies at once, an agency that paid and a chat startup that did not yet. The agency was a quiet cushion under a risky bet.
Qiscus began in 2013 with Evan Purnama, Muhammad Md Rahim and Amin Nordin. Money was thin. A seed of about US$100,000 arrived at the end of 2014, small even by Southeast Asian standards. Then Nordin left, and the product itself had to prove it was a business, not a feature. The team moved toward selling a chat SDK and later a multichannel customer inbox to companies, a far more patient and less glamorous market than consumer messaging.
The fundraising story stayed modest. Reports said Qiscus was preparing a Series A, a Malaysian investor backed an earlier pre-Series A round, and later Init6 put in a strategic investment reported at US$2 million. A confirmed Series A never surfaced in what could be found. Instead the company said it had been profitable since 2019, and Delta said there were no plans for an urgent raise, though he would not rule one out.
That is an unfashionable ending in a region that celebrates big rounds. It is also the point. Delta ran a profitable agency while the chat product searched for its market, and then he held the line on spending until Qiscus was earning its keep.
For a first-time founder the lesson is practical rather than inspiring: a side income, a co-founder who stays, and a product that pays for itself can be worth more than a headline round.