Twice, Brian Marshal has said, his company came close to bankruptcy. Not in the scrappy early days, but after Sirclo had already raised tens of millions of dollars and was counted among Indonesia's better-funded e-commerce enablers.
That is the part of the story investors rarely hear. The public version is tidy: a seed round from East Ventures in 2014, a Series A of roughly US$5 million in 2019, US$6 million more in 2020, then a US$36 million round in 2021 led by East Ventures and Saratoga, with Traveloka and Sinar Mas Land alongside. A name on every list of Indonesian startups to watch.
Warehousing, fulfilment, brand services, the unglamorous machinery that makes an online order arrive.
The real shape was messier. Marshal has described a product that began as something very similar to Shopify, a tool to let any seller open an online store. It looked simple. Then the team learned what Indonesian sellers actually struggled with. Not the storefront, but everything behind it: getting parcels moved, answering customers, keeping stock straight. A website was the easy part.
So Sirclo drifted toward the physical world. Warehousing, fulfilment, brand services, the unglamorous machinery that makes an online order arrive. It is slow, capital-hungry work, and it does not scale like software.
Then the money tightened. Funding slowed after the pandemic boom, and a company built to grow on the next round suddenly had to live on its own cash. Marshal has said it came within reach of bankruptcy twice. What almost nobody saw from outside was what he chose to do. He did not chase another pivot. He stopped the experimental software projects, downsized a couple of teams, shut down a few initiatives, and went back to the services that had always earned money.
It was a retreat, and he has been open about that. But it worked. In a 2026 conversation, Marshal laid out a plan built around consistent annual profit first, then financial checks before any possible IPO, and a logistics network built with local partners rather than warehouses in every city. The listing is an option he is keeping open, not a promise.
There is something worth noticing in the order of that plan. For a decade, the startup playbook said raise, grow, raise again. Sirclo's near misses forced the opposite lesson: earn the right to raise.
For a first-time founder, the takeaway is uncomfortable but useful. The business you start with is often not the one that pays you. Sirclo found its footing only after it stopped admiring its own ambition and went back to the oldest thing it did well.