Tokopedia is an Indonesiantechnology company specializing in e-commerce. It was founded in 2009 by William Tanuwijaya and :id:Leontinus_Alpha_Edison|Leontinus Alpha Edison. It is an Indonesian unicorn along with ride-hailing company Gojek, travel service firm Traveloka, e-commerce Bukalapak and fintech company OVO. In 2019, according to a report by iPrice Group, Tokopedia was the most visited e-commerce website on a desktop in Indonesia between July and September with a total of 65,953,400 average monthly visits, securing 25% of the total market share.
History
PT Tokopedia was founded by William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison on 6 February 2009. The company manages Tokopedia.com, which was publicly launched on 17 August. The founders, who were born and raised in small cities in Indonesia, tried to solve the discrepancy issues in the country. Thus, the company mission is to democratize commerce through technology. Starting with a marketplace business, Tokopedia has now grown into a technology company with marketplace, fintech, payment, logistics, fulfilment and new retail businesses. The company's name comes from combining toko, Indonesian for "shop", with "encyclopedia".
Investments
In 2009, PT Tokopedia received initial seed funding from PT Indonusa Dwitama of IDR 2.5 billion. In the following years, Tokopedia attracted capital injections from global venture capitals, including East Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, NetPrice, and SoftBank Ventures Korea. In October 2014, Tokopedia managed to make history as the first technology company in Southeast Asia to receive a US$100 million investment from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank Internet and Media Inc. In April 2016, Tokopedia raised another $147 million. In 2017, Tokopedia received $1.1 billion investment from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Again in 2018, the company secured $1.1 billion funding round led by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and Japan's SoftBank Group putting its valuation to about $7B.
Business products
The marketplace is Tokopedia's best-known product. Tokopedia provides a free C2C business platform for merchants and buyers. The marketplace helps merchants reach more audience than other channels. There are also official stores for well-known brands to do their B2C business. Through its marketplace products, Tokopedia offers millions of products in 25 categories. As of November 2019, Tokopedia had over 7,000,000 merchants with more than 200 million curated products ranging from food and beverages to beauty and fashion products. Tokopedia also provides digital products such as credit, BPJS payments, utility payments, telephone payments, credit cards, flight tickets, event tickets, games vouchers, and many more. In 2016, Tokopedia offered financial technology products that include digital wallets, investments, business capital loans, virtual credit cards, protection products, credit scoring based on data for a loan, and many more. In 2018, Tokopedia launched Mitra Tokopedia application to sell these FinTech products. On 12 December 2018, Fortune reported that PT Tokopedia had raised another $1.1 billion.
Data breach
On 2 May 2020, Tokopedia suffered a data breach. The leaked 15 million login details include users' gender, location, username, full fame, email address, phone number and hashed passwords. Tokopedia spokesperson Nuraini Razak confirmed that a breach had taken place and urged users to change their passwords periodically to ensure their security. A few hours later, the same hacker went viral under the pseudonym ShinyHunters for having put sale the full Tokopedia database, this time with 91 million records for $5000. Tokopedia has since been working closely with several strategic partners, including the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the National Cyber and Crypto Agency, to conduct a thorough investigation, while enhancing the security system in order to maintain user confidence.
Transactions
As of November 2019, Tokopedia claims to have more than 200 million product listings and 35 digital products. It has over 90 million monthly active users and over 7 million merchants on the platform, 86.5% of whom are the first-time entrepreneurs.
On 7 October 2019, Tokopedia announced that the K-pop group BTS would become their brand ambassador. The campaign produced multiple commercials of BTS members dancing and promoting Tokopedia while speaking Indonesian.
