Pintarnya, a Jakarta-based digital platform that helps blue-collar workers find employment opportunities, announced the closing of its seed funding round on Tuesday after securing $8 million from East Ventures and Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India.
The recent funding brings Pintarnya’s total seed round to $14.3 million — among the largest seed rounds in Southeast Asia to date— as the startup secured $6.3 million from Sequoia Capital India and General Catalyst earlier this year, which included a $100,000 grant from Sequoia Spark.
Launched in May 2022 by former senior executives at Traveloka, Nelly Nurmalasari and Henry Hendrawan, as well as former KKR executive Ghirish Pokardas, Pintarnya seeks to help Indonesian blue-collar workers get a job and improve their access to financial services.
Pintarnya connects job seekers to relevant employers, using a profile created by the job seekers themselves on its platform. It considers key information such as location and skills to offer the most suitable job to the candidate.
“With this new funding, we will grow our ecosystem of job seekers and employers across different cities in Indonesia. We will further invest in technology and data capability as our key value-add to facilitate an efficient job search process for both candidates and employers,” Pintarnya co-founder Hendrawan said in a statement.
Pintarnya is looking to tap the 60 million blue-collar workers in Indonesia who contribute about 20% of the country’s gross domestic product. Despite their significance in numbers, blue-collar workers often fall victim to job uncertainties and scams, and are often deemed unqualified for jobs related to financial services.
Just two months since its launch, Pintarnya claims to have connected more than 6,000 employers with more than 100,000 job seekers looking for jobs in the F&B, retail, logistics and hospitality sectors.
Other startups and lenders have also begun to recognise the opportunity offered by blue-collar workers in the archipelago, including financial wellness platform GajiGesa, which raised $6.6 million in a pre-Series A round in November last year. Bank Raya, formerly known as BRI Agro, is also dedicated to serving the gig economy segment in the country, which includes blue-collar workers.