about 1 hour ago
Abraresto shuts down its operations due to financial issue / Shutterstock
According to a report by e27, Abratable Pte Ltd, the parent company of Abratable (in Singapore) and Abraresto (in Indonesia) plans on shutting down the service due to funding-related financial issue it faces. Abratable entered Indonesia around two years ago by the name of Abraresto and announced a funding worth USD 1,5 million (equal to IDR 18 billion) from undisclosed Indonesian investor shortly after. The funding was allocated to deliver long-term development in Indonesia. In result, the service successfully entered Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali. Moreover, it also launched the carrots program , did local approaches, launched its app, and optimized the service by adding flagship features. All that for significant user growth. Unfortunately, the funding deal was over in the middle of last August. Abratable’s attemp to raise another funding also failed, leaving the team with no option other than shutting down their services. As quoted from e27, Abratable Pte Ltd’s Founder and CEO Ankur Mehrotra stated, “Shutting down a startup is one of hardest things an entrepreneur has to get through, mainly because of two reasons. An awesome team [of Abratable Pte Ltd] and initial bootstrapping attempts, personal cash [investment] and time […] significantly.”
From external point of view, Abraresto also has to face strict competition from Zomato with its huge sum of investment. For the time being, we have yet received any confirmation on the venture of its employees, especially those working in Indonesia. We’ll keep informing you once we receive any conformation from Abraresto. Share:

Abraresto Shuts Down Its Operations

6:41 pm on Oct 6, 2015
How one startup went bust and couldn’t pay its workers
      4 Comments
In May, my friend *Julie had an offer from a startup. She knew startup jobs are risky. “Nine out of ten startups fail” – she heard this rule of thumb many times over. Julie did all the research she could. According to reports, the startup raised a significant chunk of money a year earlier. The founder was an experienced banker and went to a prestigious business school. It all sounded legit to her, and she went on board as an independent contractor. Just three months later, by the end of August, Julie’s workplace had gone bust. She and others on the team learned – by email – that the company was out of funds and they wouldn’t be compensated for their previous month’s work. This is the nightmare the team of Indonesian restaurant review site Abraresto went through. Team members were angry and felt they hadn’t been communicated with openly in the weeks leading up to the closure. On Sunday, October 4, Abraresto founder and CEO Ankur Mehrotra issued a statement confirming the shutdown of Abraresto, along with its Singaporean parent company, Abratable . Abraresto was a site that lets users rate and review restaurants in Indonesia. It also awards them perks for loyalty. Abratable in Singapore focuses on restaurant bookings. At the time this article was written, both sites were still accessible online with no mention of the company’s closure. Based on my interviews with reliable sources and industry experts, several factors led to the firm’s demise, including inexperience on the investor’s side, and too much risk-taking on the founder’s. The US$1.5 million seed round that wasn’t
The startup’s rocky journey began with the launch of Abratable in Singapore in 2012. An early warning sign for future employees might have been the apparent lack of long-term commitment for Abratable. In August 2012, Tech in Asia reported on the launch . By 2013, it seems Abratable had discontinued its operations. The last entry on the site’s blog was dated May 2013. Several links, including the “about” page, were inactive. Ankur confirmed it was the consensus of the board to put Abratable on the back burner. “We were shifting our focus from table booking in Singapore to [a] discovery business model in Indonesia.”
So in October 2013, Ankur instead launched Abraresto , the Indonesian subsidiary of Abratable. Ankur wanted the new site to grow fast. According to a former Abraresto business partner whom I will call *Richard in this piece, a mutual friend of him and Ankur set up an investment opportunity for Abraresto in January 2014. The seed round was led by Indonesian businessman Jemy Sutjiawan, who brought his daughters in as shareholders. Two of the daughters, Sheena and Jacqueline Sutjiawan, held positions at Abraresto. Sheena was working as a sales manager until the end of March 2014, and Jacqueline was responsible for bookkeeping up until the day it shut down. Shortly after, Abraresto officially announced the investment as a seed round worth a whopping US$1.5 million – a record-breaking amount at that time. Even today, only one other Indonesia-based startup in Tech in Asia’s records has declared a seed round above US$1.5 million . From Tech in Asia’s startup database: Only one startup has announced a seed round topping US$1.5 million
The announcement, if not a lie, was stretching the truth, says Richard. “The number was deliberately inflated to scare off competitors.”
In the October 4 statement Ankur revealed that, of the total funding, only US$500,000 was in equity, and that the remaining US$1 million was a debt facility, which in the end, got canceled. Abraresto was running on US$500,000, not US$1.5 million. It had also sold a majority stake in the company to the Sutjiawans. “It’s unusual for a startup to accept debt,” an American venture capital investor familiar with the Indonesian market said. “That raises a red flag.”
The VC said having inexperienced investors as majority partners in a tech company could become a problem. “Tech needs the drive of the founder, so more than 50 percent ownership by a single investor may be hard, unless that investor is providing a ton of value,” he said. At the time of the announcement, Ankur wouldn’t have known that the debt facility was going to be scrapped. I asked him if he would have done the announcement differently in hindsight. “Total funding as per our [shareholder’s agreement] signed by the investors was north of US$1.5 million. It included a debt facility, which was later cancelled. Any other comments outside this would be speculative,” he said in response. Term sheet trouble
By 2015, Abraresto had almost spent the US$500,000 and was on the lookout for new investors. However, that process turned out to be more time consuming than anticipated, and led Ankur to take risks. After running into problems with a seed round raised from a family fund, he moved forward with an offer from another family with little experience in the tech industry. “We realized that we needed a bridge round prior to raising a full series A and raised interest from another Indonesian family fund looking to make its first startup tech investment,” says Ankur. “AbraResto closed a term sheet with the family fund in the beginning of May 2015.”
In mid-August, Ankur says, the family withdrew the term sheet and the deal fell through. Ankur did not reveal the identity of the second family investor. According to Ankur, the investor showed full commitment, which led him to believe the investment was secure. Ankur continued operations and hired new people – including my friend Julie and three others. He asked them to build up their teams, bringing on board even more people. “I was hired in May,” Julie says. “In all, there were four of us hired at the same time and I was told the company was moving to the second, more advanced stage so that was why Ankur was bringing on people with more experience than previous staff. [Ankur filled positions for] head of content, head of design and UI/UX, head of human resources and head of partnerships.”
In addition to the American VC cited earlier, I asked two other VC investors – another American and one Indonesian, who asked to be anonymous – to weigh in on the situation. Should a founder assume that the deal is done once the term sheet is signed, and make decisions based on that? From the first American investor’s point of view, the founder’s decision was risky, but understandable. “There really are two schools of thought here,” he explained. “Some investors don’t give out term sheets until they’re 99 percent sure. Other investors give out term sheets too early, I’ve heard of cases of term sheets being signed after a lunch meeting.”
On the reliability of term sheets, the second American investor said: “Startups can safely assume investment will go through, 80 percent to 90 percent of the time. However, startups should never feel safe until the capital is actually wired and hits their bank account. There are many problems that can make investors pull out at any time.”
But the same VC also added that pulling out after a high level of commitment was “very unprofessional” of the investor. “What the entrepreneur did – hiring early, is not bad. There is no time to waste by waiting, we take risks and depend on future cash flow to scale quickly, within reasonable means.”
The first American VC thought that it would have been wiser for the founder to hold off with hiring until the financial future of the company was more secure. “If you’re building a company that is going to last for years, what are a few weeks?” he said. “Legally, the investors have the right to not pursue [a deal after issuing a term sheet] further, and it is not uncommon,” the Indonesian VC said. “I think the question is: what made the investor pull out in the first place?”
The same VC said a reason for investors to pull out could be that they had signed the term sheet before completing due diligence, and later decided it was not up to their satisfaction so they end up not pursuing the deal. In Ankur’s words, “various reasons” led the investor to withdraw the term sheet in August, but that he doesn’t want to speculate. He’s also bound by a non-disclosure agreement from disclosing certain details of the deal, which makes it difficult to precisely put the finger on what happened. A team made up of contractors
The fact remains that Abraresto’s founder and CEO accepted two risky investments, and he knew he would have access to only one third of the publicly stated amount. There also seems to have been a lack of communication between Abraresto’s management and people working for it about issues related to the company’s future and the security of their positions. This affected a team of about 30 people. By July, the company was struggling and salaries were paid late. According to Ankur, some chose to stop working at this point. The August salaries of those who stayed on until the end have not been paid at all at the time of this writing. “I was not paid 60 percent of my July salary and 100 percent of August salary, plus expenses he already signed off and agreed to refund […] but he didn’t. That’s more than IDR 22 million (US$1,487),” says *Mira, who was hired in May along with Julie. “The [worst] is that I employed two designers trusting [Ankur],” she says. Ankur concedes that not all details regarding the deal closing process were communicated to team members, specifically those hired as independent contractors. These included Julie’s and Mira’s “head of department” positions. “Management did not share details of an NDA-bound term sheet closed funding deal (sic) with interns and independent contractors that were deemed not consequential to the closing of the deal,” he says. Of Abraresto’s team of 30 people that were employed in 2015, the majority were “independent contractors, freelancers, interns etc,” according to Ankur. “Management and key employees, such as our CTO, were closely involved in the deal,” Ankur says, but would rather not reveal the identities of the key employees who were in the know. Abraresto’s co-founder and CTO is Michael Cho, who lives abroad and was not involved in the daily operations of the business, according to contractors like Julie and Mira. Abraresto had a practice of outsourcing work, rather than growing a core team. Even Abraresto’s mobile app was developed by an external developer, Vincent Putera. Vincent runs an app development company called Inspira and works on digital projects for various startups , which he confirmed to me on the phone. His involvement with Abraresto ended months ago, before the startup hit serious trouble. Abraresto is part of Inspira’s client portfolio
For the current team members – whether freelancer, independent contractor, or intern – the last chance they have at retrieving at least part of the outstanding financial claims is for the company to sell its remaining assets, including computers and office furniture. This liquidation of assets, according to Ankur, is ongoing. No future for food content startups? Sadly, all three VC experts I spoke to said they had heard of similar scenarios, especially in ecosystems where founders rely on inexperienced investors. “I sometimes see these startups as white stars,” one of the American VCs says. “The founders talk a big game, they burn the brightest before they burn out, maybe to convince the staff. But it’s important for founders to plan in advance. The goal is to under-promise and over-deliver.”
Richard, the business partner who had worked with Abraresto in the earlier stages, said that in his opinion, it was Abraresto’s business model that was flawed from the start. “When people in Indonesia go out for food, they don’t book tables in advance or choose restaurants based on reviews, not to mention write their own serious reviews,” he said. Sheena, a member of the Sutjiawan family who financed the seed round, seems to have come to a similar conclusion about Abraresto’s failure. “We were expanding our community beyond [the greater Jakarta] area but we realized that the market was not ready yet and the quality of reviews were not what we expected,” she told me. Could it be that there simply isn’t a great future for food content startups in Indonesia as founders and VCs hoped for? It will be interesting to watch whether Abraresto competitors in the Indonesian market, such as Qraved and OpenRice will face similar struggles when the time comes for them to raise funds. * All names of former Abraresto business partners and work contractors were changed upon their request
Editing by Judith Balea and Terence Lee, lead image by glasseyes view
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How one startup went bust and couldn’t pay its workers

By DailySocial
Indonesian startup AbraResto’s new loyalty programme Carrots allows users to redeem all sorts of rewards from vouchers to plane tickets
It is apparent that AbraResto  is aiming to strengthen its performance in Indonesia. After successfully entering the scene with a remarkable breakthrough , AbraResto keeps designing high quality strategies, this time through a programme called “Carrots”. AbraResto is indeed aiming for significant growth by the end of this year. Ankur Mehrotra, AbraResto’s CEO, stated that Indonesia’s market is a challenge on its own level. It’s always challenging, he claimed, to enter a country where social media is people’s favourite, since he has to put more attempts to penetrate the market. Thus, he and his team designed the Carrots point programme. This, and some other local approaches, will be AbraResto’s mainstay to win the people’s heart. “We always find out the latest trend of Indonesian people, thus we frequently renew our strategy to accommodate their needs on culinary recommendation and sharing with others. This Carrots program is one of our attempts of doing so,” Mehrotra stated during his press conference (8/10). Also Read:  Echelon 2014: Run a restaurant? Let iChef take care of your orders
The Carrots is a programme where users can collect points from the activities that they do as a registered member of AbraResto. The points can be collected by actively interacting with other users as well as exploring the platform. The Carrots points that users have collected can later be exchanged with various forms of rewards. “This Carrots program is a token of our appreciation for Indonesian users. The collected points may be exchanged with various attractive items, such as restaurant vouchers, gift cards, to plane tickets to Singapore and Thailand. We even offer a special grand prize, which is an invitation to a yacht party in Seribu Islands,” Mehrotra added. Talking about the business, he admitted that the program was designed to increase the traffic. He claimed that AbreResto’s monthly growth of new users reaches 180 per cent with more than 150,000 new users have been registered so far. Besides targeting the increase of traction, Mehrotra mentioned that AbraResto will also look to add more partnership with a fleet of culinary business entities, as it’s actually the way his company monetize. So far, AbraResto has already added 40,000 restaurants in Jakarta and Bandung into its database. To get wider traction, Mehrotra stated that AbraResto doesn’t limit itself to high class restaurants, but also street vendors as well. This is particularly to reach everyone from any social classes, which results on significant increase of traffic. Such approach is really fundamental for foreign startups who want to be successful in Indonesia’s market. This and the content localisation are two things which are really important to be carried on by this Singapore-based company that works under the AbraTable Pte, Ltd.
[Header: DailySocial Doc. ]

AbraResto launches new loyalty programme Carrots

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In the past few years, Indonesian startups have been relying on venture capital firms as the main source of funding due to local companies not believing in or supporting the emerging tech ecosystem – but that notion is slowly changing. Today Tech in Asia receives word from Indonesian game developer Artoncode that it has just received seed funding from Indonesian media giant Emtek Group for an undisclosed sum. The two companies want to make and market quality homegrown gaming products and characters for a global market. Founded in 2012, Artoncode has won several gaming awards, including the Indonesian ICT Awards 2012, Sparxup 2012, and Game Developer Award 2013. Its latest smartphone game, Faunia Paw, is published by Lyto Game and now has 19,000 monthly active users. Emtek (IDX:EMTK) is the parent company of TV station SCTV, which has over 160 million viewers in Indonesia. It has other companies such as TV station O Channel and cable TV Nexmedia. This is Emtek Group’s first move into the gaming arena. Artoncode CEO Indra Gunawan says that Emtek is looking to enhance its digital content services, with gaming content as one of its new business areas. The two companies share the same vision of creating Indonesian IP – things like game characters and franchises – that can sell well both nationally and internationally. See: 8 Indonesian mobile game developers to watch
Artoncode will rebrand its music game Melodi as Harmoni with the help of the media giant. Furthermore, Artoncode is working with Surabaya-based story and game developer Vandaria , which has written a number of novels and created a card game based on the Vandaria universe. Artoncode plans to create games out of it, and may even create a short movie based on the franchise. Emtek’s animation studio and media prowess can help a lot with this project. With Emtek on board, the 18-man team at Artoncode will get assistance with things like financial affairs, legal, and a marketing strategy. Major Indonesian companies are now beginning to see the value of investing in the nation’s startups. Earlier this year, an unamed Indonesian conglomerate invested in food discovery site Abraresto . Editing by Steven Millward

Indonesian TV company makes first move into games, invests in gaming startup Artoncode

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Indonesia is known for its delicacies, and it’s great to know that more startups are showcasing the country’s culinary potential online. One such company, food directory AbraResto , revealed today that it has expanded its service to Bandung. The website starts off with 4,000 restaurant and eatery listings for that city, which tips the total number of entries on its database past the 40,000 mark. AbraResto says it has grown at a tremendous pace this year, averaging 182 percent month-on-month growth in 2014. Currently the startup records 1.2 million monthly page-views, with more than 8,000 reviews and ratings submitted by its users so far. Besides searching for dining information, AbraResto users can also ‘follow’ other food lovers to get their recommendations, similar to what India-based Zomato recently started doing . Bandung is a popular food destination in Indonesia, and a lot of Jakarta residents will travel there over the weekends just to get a taste of their favorite dishes. (See: New food discovery site Abraresto will find tough competition in Indonesia )
AbraResto CEO Ankur Mehrotra, who previously worked in the banking industry, explains:
With the launch in Bandung, residents and travellers alike now have easy access to information about all the top food spots in town. Whether you are a traveller or a local, in a culinary heaven like Bandung, there is always more to explore. Competition in Indonesia’s restaurant hunting space is quite tough. AbraResto faces rivals like Qraved , OpenRice , IndoTable , and MakanLuar . AbraResto’s recent US$1.5 million funding will definitely come in handy in growing faster than its many rivals. This post was originally published on our Indonesian site Tech in Asia ID , which you should totally bookmark and follow on Twitter and Facebook now. Editing by Steven Millward

AbraResto hits 1.2 million monthly page-views, adds food listings for Bandung

Abraresto is an Indonesia-based food discovery website.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
10/5/2015	Dead		Dead	$XXM	0 FY undefined	1
1/29/2014	Angel	$XXM	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	10/5/2015	1/29/2014
Round	Dead	Angel
Amount		$XXM
Investors	Dead	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	10

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