Gojek, an Indonesian based digital payment and on-demand multi-services platform in its recent fundraising have received investments from the American based companies Facebook and PayPal apart from the investments from Google and Tencent. The company sees this investment as an opportunity to support its mission in uplifting the Southeast Asian economy digitally by emphasizing on the financial services and payment in the region.
The US tech company, Facebook has made an investment in an Indonesian based business for the first time. The Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Whatsapp Matt Idema has said that the company sees this as an opportunity to create new business in Indonesia. As a part of the investment, the payment capabilities of Paypal are to be merged into Gojek’s. Moreover, both the companies Gojek and Paypal are to collaborate to allow GoPay, the digital payment gateway of Gojek to have access to the 25 million merchants of Paypal globally. Both Google and Tencent, which made investments in Gojek in 2018 have collaborated on multiple projects.
After the launch of the Gojek app in 2015, it has witnessed the potential growth to be the single stop application of Southeast Asia, enabling digital payments, food delivery, on-demand services, and transportation. GoPay, the digital payment platform of Gojek is deeply focused on improving the access of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), to the digital economy as a majority of them depend on cash for its operations. Since the launch in 2015, it claims has paved the way for hundreds and thousands of merchants to go digital in their platform providing them with access to more than 170 million Southeast Asian users.
The new round of funding from Facebook and PayPal is expected to help Gojek in further digitizing even micro-merchants to huge businesses looking forward to reinforcing their digital payment facilities. The Co-CEO of Gojek Kevin Aluwi has said that since 2015, they were heavily focussed on the potential growth of micro-businesses and entrepreneurs through their platform and added that it would remain the same for the years to come. Now with the investment from the big tech companies, they are more confident in delivering high-class products and services to their players.
