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WFM start-up Sampingan raises $5m in series A round
The 2020 public health crisis has been a boon to blue-collar workforce management (WFM) platform Sampingan, increasing its app download and partner statistics to sustain its winning fundraising streak for the third consecutive year since 2018.
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Homegrown start-up Sampingan has raised US$5 million in series A funds that it plans to use to expand its business operations.
The funding round was led by Altara Ventures, a Singapore-based venture capital (VC) firm with a Southeast Asian focus, along with fellow regional VC investors Golden Gate Ventures, Antler, Access Ventures, XA Network and iSeed SEA.
“We are humbled by the trust and support we have received from both new and existing investors,” Sampingan CEO Wisnu Nugrahadi said in a statement. “The fund will be allocated to improving products for both workers and businesses, and to reach more customers with our suite of business offerings.”
Sampingan said that its workforce management (WFM) solutions provided end-to-end services and products for sourcing, recruiting, managing and retaining blue-collar workers to help companies scale up their businesses.
It added that the start-up was currently partnering with more than 850,000 temporary and permanent workers, following a significant increase in worker partners and application downloads last year, from the start of the coronavirus outbreak in March through to December. The company recorded a four-fold jump in mobile app downloads over that period to reach the 1 million download milestone.
According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS), the growth in downloads was likely a result of the health crisis that upended the job market and led to 2.67 million job losses between August 2019 and August 2020.
“Sampingan is defining the future of work in Southeast Asia. The 2010s unleashed the on-demand gig economy on consumer services, and the 2020s will expand this into the realm of businesses,” said Altara Ventures general partner Gavin Teo.
“Sampingan has matched thousands of Indonesian freelancers with jobs in areas like logistics, supply chain and local services using their technology platform,” he added.
The start-up claims that it has become the largest blue-collar WFM platform for businesses since entering the market in January 2019.
Sampingan bagged $1.5 million in its 2019 pre-series A funding led by Golden Gate Ventures, in which Antler was also a participant, to follow $500,000 in seed funding it received in December 2018 from Golden Gate.
