Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro spent time as an investor before he became a shopkeeper's partner. He was an investment associate at East Ventures, the Jakarta firm that backs early-stage startups. At some point the person looking at business plans decided to build one himself.
The company was announced in February 2018 as a project born inside East Ventures, with a US$4m seed round. SMDV, Digital Garage, East Ventures, Insignia Ventures Partners and Triputra Group put in money, along with unnamed angel investors. Harya Putra was named chief operating officer in the press statement.
Because a startup that sells to shopkeepers lives or dies on their daily routine, and the founders had to earn a place in it.
The problem it chose was everywhere. Indonesia has millions of warungs, the corner shops that sell cigarettes, instant noodles and phone credit. Owners buy stock from wholesalers on their own schedule, keep paper records and have little access to digital payments. Warung Pintar aimed to turn them into smart outlets: technology to run the shop, access to supplies and financial products in one place.
The bet worked well enough to raise more money fast. A follow-on of roughly Rp57bn was reported in mid-2018. In January 2019 came a Series B of US$27.5m, with existing investors returning and the payments app OVO joining as a new backer. By August 2021 Bezharie was telling DealStreetAsia that the company was in talks about a Series C.
Why does that matter? Because a startup that sells to shopkeepers lives or dies on their daily routine, and the founders had to earn a place in it. The tension was always the same. Warung owners could not be forced to adopt anything. Every smartphone, every fridge and every supplier relationship had to prove itself in a business that runs on cash and daily habit. Meanwhile a wave of better-funded B2B commerce startups was chasing the same shops.
The company that began as an East Ventures project kept those ties through its funding rounds, with East Ventures among the backers named in the seed. There is a founder lesson in the order of events. Bezharie had seen hundreds of pitches from the investor's side of the table, then picked a market so ordinary that most people had stopped noticing it. The opportunity was not in a new behaviour but in an old one that millions repeated every morning.