Pintarnya, an innovative Indonesian employment platform, recently announced that it has successfully raised $16.7 million in a Series A funding round. According to StartEngine, Square Peg was the round’s most influential participant. US-based 500 Global was joined by existing investors Vertex Venture Southeast Asia & India and East Ventures. In 2022, Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan launched Pintarnya. In doing so the company fervently empowers blue-collar workers by delivering in-demand financial services and carving out full-time, side-gig opportunities along the way.
Pintarnya focuses on reaching adults ages 21 to 40 primarily. The vast majority of these users only have a high school diploma or equivalent or have completed vocational training. The platform focuses specifically on blue-collar workers, equipping them with personalized, actionable solutions. Its free tools such as quick-apply functionality for walk-in interviews and low-cost e-learning resources to upskill make the process easier.
One of Pintarnya’s most important value-adds is its integration with financial services, especially lending. Particularly, the platform addresses the issue of lack of borrowing access for its users. It works with asset-backed lenders to provide their borrowers with asset secured loans. These loans use collateral like gold, electronics, and vehicles to make sure users are afforded safer financial products.
Hendrawan stressed the importance of weaving financial services into Pintarnya’s model.
“Through the journey of building employment services, we discovered that our users needed more than just jobs — they needed access to financial services that traditional banks couldn’t provide,” – Hendrawan.
The platform’s integration of lending services has proven beneficial, as this has become the most demanded financial service among Pintarnya’s user base. In under two months, Pintarnya already increased its ARR nearly five-fold from last year’s. The company now forecasts it’ll be break-even by the end of this year. Today, the platform supports more than 10 million active job seekers and connects them to around 40,000 employers in Indonesia.
Pintarnya’s goal is to provide more services to blue-collar and informal Indonesia workforce. This often marginalized demographic faces challenges in job acquisition and access to capital as well. Traditional systems that still rely almost exclusively on an offline process pose serious barriers.
Traditionally, mass workers in Indonesia find jobs offline through job fairs or word of mouth, with employers buried in paper applications and candidates rarely hearing back. For borrowing, their options are usually reduced to family or friends or predatory lenders with aggressive collection tactics, Hendrawan stated.
At the heart of Pintarnya’s solution to these challenges is artificial intelligence. By digitizing the job matching process, this technology helps employers and job seekers more effectively navigate the hiring process. This new technological approach directly addresses the complications involved in speeding up the hiring process. Secondly, it aims to provide workers healthier and safer lending alternatives that align with their monetary capacity.
“We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt,” – Hendrawan added.
Pintarnya hopes to see itself across its users’ lives. Hendrawan articulated this vision by stating,
“Our vision is for Pintarnya to be the everyday companion that empowers Indonesians to not only make ends meet today but also plan, grow, and upgrade their lives tomorrow … In five years, we see Pintarnya as the go-to super app for Indonesia’s workers, not just for earning income, but as a trusted partner throughout their life journey,” – Hendrawan.
Pintarnya continues to scale the company’s services, while accelerating the rate it’s adding users. The startup is passionate about their work to serve Indonesia’s blue-collar workers with access to jobs and key financial services.
