just made his first investment in a  Southeast Asian e-commerce start-up.

It was incredibly fortunate and  a huge fan boy moment for me.

But it's not one of the region's  billion-dollar unicorns.  

It's a mom-and-pop shop start-up that's  been around for less than two years.

If I look at last month's numbers,  we've grown more than 200 times.

And it just so happens that some of the  founders are Bezos' former employees.

I wrote a memo, which is a very Amazon  style thing to do. You don't send a deck;  

you send a written note. Wow, so taking a leaf out of  

the leadership book from Jeff Bezos seems to have  

paid dividends there. It's inspirational.

Indonesian e-commerce start-up Ula  is a wholesale marketplace aiming  

to modernize the country's millions  of mom-and-pop kiosks, or warungs,  

by providing inventory and logistics  services, as well as financing.

Founded in January 2020 by CEO Nipun  Mehra, the company has thrived under  

a pandemic-induced shift to digital, so  far raising over $117 million in funding  

from big names like Tencent and  Lightspeed Venture Partners.

One among them is Bezos Expeditions,  

whose billionaire owner was told about Ula  by one of the start-up's early backers.

In a region where Amazon has limited  presence, Jeff Bezos's investment  

of an undisclosed sum through his family  office can be seen as a vote of confidence.

Nipun previously worked at Boston Consulting  Group and Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart,  

but he started his career as a  software engineer at Amazon in 2004.

If you'd have asked me at that time that there  would be a day, you know, 15 years later,  

where this moment would come, I would  have probably been like it's a dream.

Despite never meeting Bezos, Nipun yearned  to be an entrepreneur, just like him.  

It was during his time as an investor at Sequoia  India when he saw an opportunity to adapt the  

traditional business-to-consumer e-commerce model  for a new market: small food kiosks in Indonesia.

The B2C angle, the typical Amazon,  Flipkart, or here, in Southeast Asia,  

we have Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia and so  on, it has been more on the non-food side,  

primarily. Foods is a very different way of  running things. Usually in emerging economies,  

their income profile is such that they have  to buy frequently and in small baskets.  

And the moment you get into that dynamic, the traditional way of doing e-commerce doesn't work,  

because you can't deliver a three-, four-,  five-dollar basket to somebody's home and do  

it profitably and sustainably, so you  have to find other ways of doing it.

Indonesia, with its vast population  and fast-growing economy,  

is seen as a huge opportunity  for entrepreneurs and investors.

Central to that are the country's  millions of neighborhood kiosks,  

which sell fast moving consumer goods, like drinks  and packaged food, as well as household items.

They're an integral part of society,  

especially in the smaller cities and  provinces outside the capital Jakarta,  

accounting for almost three-quarters of the  country's $47 billion consumer goods sales.

Many rely on traditional means  of replenishing their supplies  

by shuttering their stores when they  visit wholesalers to stock up wares.

Abheek Anand, a managing director at Sequoia  India, one of Ula's investors, explained more.

They are essentially run by one or two people,  who act like consumers. They own the business;  

they need to procure things for themselves  to sell. And for them to actually  

tap into offline supply chains is actually very  inefficient. They have to go to the local market,  

spend hours figuring out what  to buy, where to buy it from.

Nipun wanted to simplify that process by  creating a business-to-business platform  

that would enable stallholders to  order stock at competitive rates  

and have it delivered to  their store for a small fee.

So, he called on his contacts in the e-commerce  space to help him realize the vision.  

His former colleague from Amazon,  Alan Wong, Riky Tenggara from Lazada,  

and Procter & Gamble executive Derry  Sakti rounded out the founding team.

The traditional store owner, they're  on YouTube, they're on TikTok,  

they're spending time on WhatsApp. They're  digital. They're more digital than many of us.  

So how do we bring that advantage and say  okay, we've learned all this stuff in Amazon,  

we've learned all this stuff in business  school. How do we bring some of that  

into this little smartphone and help them both  make more money as well as save more money?

The business got off to a steady start. But  within months of launching in January 2020,  

the pandemic hit, making demand  for services like Ula more urgent.

Lockdowns made it harder for stallholders to  source goods from wholesalers, even as customer  

demand for daily essentials grew. That caused  many mom-and-pop shops to pile onto the platform.

The need in the market just  completely switched. In lockdown,  

your first priority is to get your  food, is to get things that you consume.

The founders responded quickly,  onboarding tens of thousands of  

stallholders and expanding their team of 15  to 400 across Indonesia, Singapore and India.

That rapid growth caught the eye of investors,  

helping them to attract their first  round of investment within six months.

To Nipun's credit, he's been able to get  a lot of momentum very early and clearly a  

lot of other investors are seeing that. The most  exciting addition to the company is Jeff Bezos,  

who's invested, which is obviously nice validation  for the business. But there are a number of other  

really smart people who have  joined us along the way.

To date, Southeast Asia is  home to 35 billion-dollar  

startups, of which three-quarters (76%)  are from Indonesia and Singapore. Of them,  

26% are in the financial technology sector,  20% are in e-commerce and 11% are in logistics.

In October 2021, Ula closed its  Series B round, raising $87 million.  

Nipun said the cash will go towards expanding  its existing marketplace offering, as well as  

launching a so-called buy now, pay later service  to provide stallholders with small loans.

What is to come is what we call the working  capital problem. That's something which we  

are building. Working capital helps  you expand how much you can keep in  

your store and therefore you will not run  out when the customer needs something.

The foundations are there, the  customers want the service.  

What we need to do now is continue to build on it.

Within the next 18 months,  Nipun hopes to quadruple  

the number of merchants Ula works  with from 70,000 today to 300,000.

He also hopes to help merchants  expand into new categories  

such as apparel and technology, with the  ultimate goal of doubling their income.

Why restrict yourself to the items  that are in your store? Why can't  

you order everything that your customer  needs? Why can't you be that channel?  

And those are tougher problems to solve  and will take longer. But, in my mind,  

that is what will lead to a new form of retail.  Not something which we have seen in the U.S.,  

not something which we have seen in China. It  will be an Indonesia-specific, unique solution.

It's a bold goal for any entrepreneur, let  alone one building in the midst of a pandemic.

There will always be uncertainty in life, there  will always be risk in life. You just have to  

say I'm going to try this and I  will deal with whatever comes. 

And I'm sure that if you'd known that a  pandemic was a few months around the corner,  

you might not have started this  time either but you still managed. 

That is true too. That is true too. So  in that sense the timing was perfect. 

Perfectly bad, but it seems to have worked out. Perfectly bad, correct.