In January 2024 Zenius sent students a short message. It apologised for the inconvenience and said it was temporarily halting operations, citing operational challenges. There was no date for a return. For a company that had spent twenty years telling teenagers that understanding beats memorising, it was a quiet ending.
What many users did not know was how small it had started. Zenius did not begin as an app. In 2004 it was an offline exam-preparation operation, run by Sabda PS with Wisnu Subekti and Medy Suharta, coaching school leavers for the brutal state-university entrance tests. It only became a formal company in 2007. The first classroom came long before the first server.
Then the pandemic closed schools, and edtech became the fashionable place to put money.
The founders' bet was that concepts, not tricks, would win. They filmed lessons and put them online while most tutoring in Indonesia still meant sitting in a rented hall. Over time the videos reached what the company later described as millions of students, and by December 2022 the platform reported more than 16 million users.
Then the pandemic closed schools, and edtech became the fashionable place to put money. Investors including Northstar Group, Alpha JWC, Openspace Ventures and Beacon Venture Capital came in. In March 2022 a round led by Telkom's MDI Ventures took total funding to about US$40m, or Rp622bn. That same year Zenius bought the tutoring chain Primagama, tying its online lessons to a brand with physical branches and decades of recognition.
By then the weather had turned. Edtech funding froze as pandemic habits reversed and students went back to classrooms. In May 2022 more than 200 employees were let go. A second round followed in August 2022 and a third in February 2023. Reports in 2023 also described a larger cut, though that figure comes from a single outlet and is not used here. The company that had grown by raising money now had to survive without it.
In January 2024 the announcement came. Sabda said in a statement that the team had taken strategic steps to stop operations temporarily, but would not stop trying to realise the vision.
The hard lesson is that a loyal audience is not the same as a business that pays for itself. Zenius had both a method and a following, and still depended on a funding climate it could not control. Twenty years of teaching, it turns out, did not guarantee a twenty-first.