In November 2021, about 130 people who had lent a combined Rp14 billion through a farm-lending app opened their accounts and found no repayment. The app was TaniFund, a lending arm of TaniHub. The company said harvests had failed.
It was a hard sentence to read for a business built on a hopeful idea. TaniHub began in 2016 as a way to link Indonesian farmers to buyers who wanted fresh produce, and for a few years it looked like proof that agriculture could be a tech business. Its co-founders included Ivan Arie Sustiawan and Pamitra Wineka. Behind them came the money.
Cold storage, warehouses, logistics and credit all had to work at once, and food margins are thin.
In 2019 state-linked venture arms MDI Ventures, from Telkom, and BRI Ventures made a joint US$25 million investment. In 2021 MDI Ventures led a US$65.5 million Series B, with BRI Ventures and Telkomsel Mitra Investasi taking part. Those were large numbers for farm-to-table in Indonesia, and the pitch was ambitious: buy from farmers, sell to restaurants and homes, and finance the farmers in between.
The model was heavy. Cold storage, warehouses, logistics and credit all had to work at once, and food margins are thin. After the TaniFund problems, layoffs followed. TaniHub closed warehouses in Bandung and Bali, and stopped its household B2C business to concentrate on supplying businesses.
Then the story moved from business trouble to a courtroom. In July 2025 South Jakarta prosecutors detained Sustiawan, former director Edison Tobing and the head of MDI Ventures, on allegations that investor money from the 2019 US$25 million round had been misused. In June 2026 a court sentenced executives from both venture arms in the case, and reporting says Sustiawan was found guilty of corruption and money laundering and given nine years. Wineka has not been implicated in the case in the reporting we have seen.
What the case leaves behind is a warning that reaches past one company. When a startup is funded by state-owned money, every cheque has an audience that is not the founders. Rapid scale in a low-margin, weather-dependent business meant that a single bad harvest season could turn into a lending default, and the people hurt first were small lenders who had trusted an app.
For a founder, the quiet lesson is about order. Credit, logistics and trading each deserve to be proven on their own before they are tied together, and investor funds deserve the discipline of a ledger that can survive being read aloud in court.