Pacific Money | Economy | Southeast Asia
Despite their initial promise, many of the country’s major tech firms are struggling to create value for shareholders.
A few years ago, Indonesia’s tech sector was unambiguously booming. According to Deal Street Asia, Indonesian start-ups raised over $9 billion in venture capital in 2021. Green-jacketed Go-Jek drivers were everywhere, new unicorns were being minted seemingly every month, and just about everyone had a new idea for an app that was going to revolutionize the economy, change the world and make them rich in the process.
One of Go-Jek’s co-founders, Nadiem Makarim, became Minister of Education in 2019 and was expected to push big systemic reforms. Home-grown e-commerce platform Bukalapak went public in 2021, raising over $1 billion at a nearly $6 billion valuation. Go-Jek merged with Tokopedia to create GoTo, a behemoth that stretched across the entire digital ecosystem, then had their own splashy IPO in 2022 which valued the company at around $30 billion. At the time, it seemed like nothing but upside.
The world of 2026 is a very different place. Investment has dried up, with Deal Street Asia reporting that start-up funding fell to around $300 million in 2025. GoTo’s stock price has plummeted since 2022, wiping out billions in shareholder value while majority ownership of Tokopedia was sold to China’s ByteDance. Index provider MSCI recently warned that if conditions don’t improve, GoTo could be removed from its investment indexes. Meanwhile, Nadiem Makarim is facing up to 18 years in prison after a highly controversial corruption trial. How did a promising boom end up taking such a turn?
