16/10/2018 – Indonesian ecommerce startup Bukalapak has confirmed the latest acqui hiring of the talents at Prelo, a peer-to-peer online marketplace selling preloved items.
Following the deal, Bukalapak will leverage on the Prelo’s expertise in quality assurance and security, as well as to benefit from the close market segment that the startup shares with Bukalapak on the C2C marketplace.
For Prelo, there is no news yet on whether it will continue its operations after the acquihire, but so far the platform itself still remains accessible to date.
“We didn’t acquire Prelo, we just acquired the talents behind the company to join us in Bukalapak,” said Bukalapak’s Chief Strategy Officer Teddy Oetomo, adding that there’s no further comment on their future strategy for now.
Bukalapak did not specify how many Prelo employees it is adding to its team. However, the company did confirm that Prelo’s founder Fransiska Hadiwidjana has joined Bukalapak as its head of business.
While this move is Bukalapak’s first publicly known major acquisition of another company or its assets since its last funding round in late 2017 backed by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC.
This however, is not the first acquisition or acquihire scheme by Bukalapak. Previously, the company had already acquired several software houses, said the Co-Founder and President of Bukalapak M. Fajrin Rasyid.
Bukalapak has constantly been on an ongoing process of exploring the acquisition of ecommerce players that synergize with the company and it was reported that Prelo was their first target.
The company had set up a special merger and acquisition team that targets to achieve its ambition of serving 10 million people by 2025.
“We see that Prelo has a huge market share, and also a high-quality team that has the spirit of opening business opportunities. At the same time, they share the same vision as Bukalapak,” said Oetomo.
Prelo describes itself as an ecommerce platform for second-hand goods. The startup maintains a strict quality assurance process and fights counterfeit goods by presenting a secured buying & selling platform for pre-loved items or second-hand items.
The startup is based in the Indonesian city of Bandung, which incidentally is also the location that Bukalapak is slated to open a new R&D center soon.
