Jogja Digital Valley
Digital startups seeding in Yogyakarta
Yogyakarta is known for being the cultural capital of Java, Indonesia’s largest island (see our post on the Sultan’s army of creators.) This culture has traditionally taken the form of art, architecture, and craftsmanship. But now there’s a movement to make Yogyakarta the hub of a new type of culture: digital.
And Jogja Digital Valley is at the center of that movement. Stepping through the sliding glass doors, a cool white interior with excellent typography sets the backdrop for the reception desk. You feel like you could be in Silicon Valley, and that impression continues into the building itself: rows of gleaming digital devices, co-working space, and on that particular day, a conference room full of young techies learning about the finer points of a particular programming language. The differences are also apparent: in contrast to much of the tech industry in the States, many of the people in the room are women, and in keeping with Muslim tradition, headscarves are ubiquitous.
We sat down with Putro, the Community Manager at Digital Valley. He talked us through the origin story. Telkom, Indonesia’s largest telecommunications company, recognized the need for a more robust creative ecosystem to encourage start-ups and tech innovation. So, they reached out to successful entrepreneurs in Yogyakarta, including Putro, and invited them to join the effort to build a hub for digital innovation.
The result is Jogja Digital Valley. What they do can be roughly divided into two parts: co-working space, and incubator. The co-working space attracts artists, students, developers, and designers, who come for the community and the fast Internet (100 mbps up and down, which makes it almost certainly the fastest Internet in the city.) There are events almost every day of the week that provide further opportunities for learning and connection, on topics ranging from marketing to coding. They estimate the space has over 1,000 users every month.
Awesome as the co-working spaces is, the primary purpose of Digital Valley is as start-up incubator. They select 10 early-stage start-ups every year, and provide seed funding for six months. The total amount of the seed funding is 250 million rupiah, or about $20,000 (a significant amount in a country where per capita annual income is less than $4,000.) In addition to funding, the start-ups get office space, and perhaps most valuable of all, mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and the leadership of Telkom.
After six months, Telkom arranges a business match-making event, where the start-ups pitch their idea to venture capital firms. Telkom may also offer to acquire the start-up, if its outlook is promising and the business plan is aligned with Telkom’s strategy.
So far, Digital Valley has incubated 40 start-ups, as well as serving as a meeting and working space for the innovator community of Yogyakarta. They’re well-funded, they’re on a mission, and most important, they have good people. Their vision is to make Yogyakarta the Silicon Valley of Indonesia; given enough time, they might do just that.
