Indonesia’s Go-jek has acquired Bangalore based startup, C42 And CodeIgnition, with Sequoia playing the match-maker role.
The acquiring company was a consulting client of ours introduced to us by Sequoia mid last year. We’d been building their systems for a few months already as consultants, so they knew our capabilities well and were already leaning on us in a big way – our engineering work had contributed to 40x scaling in daily transaction volumes at the time acquisition talks were initiated. [Sidu, cofounder]
The original plan was wanted to build an R&D centre here in India to be able to hire experienced product folk. After working with us for a few months, they figured it was much better for the business to acquire us rather than start from scratch as we were already battle tested and had a leadership team in place that had proven it could get things done well.
Go-jek is the largest online business in Indonesia now in the people transport (GO-RIDE), logistics (GO-BOX, GO-SEND), O2O and hyperlocal space (GO-MART), and the fastest growing in the world outside of China – 900x increase in monthly transaction volumes in ~10 months. The company already has the largest food delivery business (GO-FOOD) in SE Asia.
The co-founders of C42 are taking on the following roles: CTO of Go-Pay, the digital payments business (Ajey Gore, ex CEO CodeIgnition, ex CTO Hoppr.com, ex Head of Tech ThoughtWorks India), Chief Architect (Niranjan Paranjape, ex CTO C42, ex ThoughtWorks) and Chief Product Officer (Aakash Dharmadhikari, ex CPO C42, ex Burrp.com). I’m building out the India operations as MD of Gojek India (ex CEO C42, ex ThoughtWorks).
All four of the founders are also joining the board of directors of Go-jek.
