Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, has invested in Lummo, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup, through his venture capital firm Bezos Expedition. The billionaire took part in Lummo’s Series C round of funding. Lummo closed the round in January, raising a total of $80 million from new investors Tiger Global Management and existing backer Sequoia Capital India.
Lummo was formerly known as BukuKas and is based in Jakarta and Bengaluru. The fresh capital, according to a senior company official, will help the company strengthen its talent base in India, where it plans to more than triple its technology and product workforce. It also plans to triple its investment in Indian talent across product, human resources, engineering, strategy, and finance.
Krishnan Menon, CEO, and founder of Lummo said, “We are honored to have Jeff Bezos’ support in this Series C investment round as we prime our business for exponential growth over the coming months and years. The investment will strengthen Lummo’s efforts to further build on our direct-to-consumer product offerings and deliver greater value to entrepreneurs and businesses in Indonesia. We hope to accelerate their business growth and maximize operational efficiency using our SaaS model.”
BukuKas, founded in 2019, by Krishnan Menon and Lorenzo Peracchione. The startup offers a bookkeeping app that helps small and medium businesses get online, much like Shopify. In 2020, the company expanded by announcing Tokko, an online direct-to-consumer commerce builder. Tokko has since been rebranded as LummoShop.
LummoSHOP, Lummo’s flagship offering, provides analytics and retargeting capabilities to entrepreneurs as well as brands in order to accelerate repeat orders using their customers’ records and purchase history. Chat commerce, custom domains & websites, collection integration, multi-platform management, and personalized branding features are among the other robust features. The company claims with the multiple platform management integration both entrepreneurs and brands are using its software-as-a-service to handle all of their customer orders from different shopping platforms, making LummoSHOP the one place where they can handle all of their online commerce operations. The platform will also facilitate them in designing their own official custom website, giving them the capabilities to build their own distinct brand and identity.
Jeff Bezos, a pioneer of e-commerce, focuses on building long-term businesses. It will be amazing to see how he and his other venture capitalists connect to Lummo’s D2C model, which allows entrepreneurs and brands to create long-term competitive businesses. Bezos has a long history of investing in Indonesia. The founder of Amazon.com made his first investment in the country with Ula, a B2B marketplace that attracted $7 million from Bezos Expeditions. Indonesia’s startup ecosystem is gaining the attention of tech conglomerates, with Facebook, Google, and Microsoft already investing in the archipelago.