Back in 2015, Suwandi Soh left his job as a business consultant to establish Sleekr, a business software provider.

While renowned foreign software providers such as SAP and Oracle focus on corporate clients, Sleekr is among dozens of local start-ups targeting the untapped market of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Within two years, Sleekr captured thousands of SME clients, ranging from cafes to retailers, but Suwandi was still dissatisfied with the growth rate.

The company thus quietly acquired rival start-up Talenta and quietly merged with accounting software start-up Jurnal last year. The three companies then began consolidating into the SME-oriented software heavyweight, Mekari.

As part of the consolidation, Talenta founder Joshua Kevin became the marketing head, while Jurnal cofounders Anthony Kosasih and Daniel Witono respectively took the positions of chief operation officer and chief product officer.

“We decided that we could realize our vision faster if we worked together,” Suwandi told The Jakarta Post last week at Mekari’s launch in Jakarta.

The event also introduced tax processing software Klikpajak, Mekari’s third service product after its accountancy and employee management services. The three services are sold separately, but are designed to synch automatically.

Indonesian Fintech Association (Aftech) director Ajisatria Suleiman said that Mekari’s three service products had made the company one of the most comprehensive and most competitive software start-ups in the market.

Ajisatria told the Post earlier this year that the drawback of local software providers was their limited services. Notable examples included Gadjian, which offered only employee management software, and OnlinePajak, which provided only tax management services.

Nevertheless, Mekari did not touch vertical services like point-of-sales transactions and customer relations management that were offered by local start-ups such as Moka and Kata.ai.

Suwandi said even though Sleekr had plans for Series B financing this year, it had no plans to diversify into new verticals or capturing microentrepreneurs, which contributed 36 percent to GDP.

“We once experimented with giving microentrepreneurs our product for free, hoping that they would use it in upgrading to small enterprises and then pay for the service. It didn’t work,” he said.

He added that Sleekr’s three verticals currently served 10,000 SMEs nationwide with a potential target of 300,000 enterprises. This target represented internal estimates of the number of tax-paying SMEs, which were most likely to use these services.

“But because the tax office has plans to enforce tax compliance among more SMEs, we expect to capture up to one million enterprises within five years,” he said.

Small enterprises is defined as companies with Rp 300 million (US$21,000) to Rp 500 million in annual revenues, while a medium enterprise has annual revenues of Rp 500 million to Rp 10 billion.

SMEs contribute 24 percent to GDP, yet many are relatively low-tech businesses. In fact, the Communication and Information Ministry’s data shows that only 9 percent of SMEs are “advanced” enough to use e-commerce platforms as a marketing tool.

Local software providers are confident that these advanced SMEs will eventually demand more than marketing tools.

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