At lunch in a small Indonesian restaurant, a corporate executive said he would pay later. The proprietor recorded the debt in a book. Abhinay Peddisetty and Chinmay Chauhan were looking for a business to build, and here was something worth investigating, sitting beside the bill. A customer could finish lunch while the restaurant was still waiting to finish the transaction. The book held the difference.
It was an ordinary arrangement with an awkward second act: somebody eventually had to ask for the money. The pair wondered how widely the habit extended, how merchants tracked it, and what happened when the record failed. The question would take them beyond that restaurant and into months of conversations. In 2019, they founded BukuWarung.
Peddisetty brought a particular kind of familiarity to the problem. Small-business ownership already had a face for him. His mother ran an optical store in India. Chauhan's mother worked as a tailor. Before there were investors or a company name, there were parents whose livelihoods depended on keeping a modest enterprise going.
The shop before the startup
In a public tribute for International Women's Day in 2022, Peddisetty described his mother raising him and his brother as a single parent from the time he was five. He credited her with making their education possible and giving him the freedom to pursue his ambitions. He also named her as his inspiration for building BukuWarung.
That connection gives his choice of customers a personal weight. The small merchant in a presentation can become an abstraction, represented by a very large number and a very small icon. Peddisetty had a family reference point for the person behind the counter. His mother's example joined economic independence to the daily work required to sustain it.
He studied for a bachelor's degree at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science. His subsequent career moved through businesses serving other businesses: he was a founding team member and head of business at hiring platform Belong.co, then head of enterprise business at Carousell. Growth, partnerships and revenue became his working vocabulary.
Those jobs also supplied a practical education in Southeast Asia. At Carousell, he and Chauhan became colleagues. Peddisetty travelled to Indonesia for the marketplace's expansion work; Chauhan brought experience building for the country at Grab. Their eventual decision to start there followed work, relationships and familiarity with the market.
Four hundred conversations before the answer
A restaurant anecdote can suggest a company. It cannot establish how many people need one. Before BukuWarung's official launch, the founders spent more than three months visiting different regions of Indonesia and talking individually with more than 400 merchants about bookkeeping, credit records and calculations.
The distinction matters. An observation made over lunch might describe a single establishment, a single trade or a single town. Visiting other businesses gave them a way to test whether they were seeing a recurring problem. Their early work asked whether the difficulty persisted across different business types, sizes and locations.
They settled on a simple starting point: electronic bookkeeping for microbusinesses. Sales, expenses and amounts owed could move from a paper ledger into an app. A merchant could see the state of the business without reconstructing it from scattered entries. The notebook had already demonstrated the demand for keeping records. The founders were proposing a different place to keep them.
Merchant conversations across Indonesian regions, over more than three months.
Peddisetty's own account of the company's first two years adds another useful detail: the founders bootstrapped the first six months. In an industry fond of telling its history from the first funding announcement, he included the stretch before that announcement was available.
A reminder with better manners
Credit between neighbours is a social relationship with an accounting problem attached. A shopkeeper may know a customer's family, shopping habits and usual payday. Knowing all that does not make asking for an overdue payment a pleasant errand. Friendship is a rather imprecise accounts-receivable department.
BukuWarung's early reminders addressed that awkwardness. The app could send a message about an outstanding balance through channels such as WhatsApp or SMS. It gave the merchant a way to follow up without making every collection a personal confrontation. Keeping the record and asking for repayment belonged in the same workflow.
In April 2020, the company reported more than 250,000 micro, small and medium enterprises recording transactions across over 500 cities and small towns. Many were outside the largest urban centres. The early investor announcement described faster credit repayments and time saved on manual bookkeeping. Those were reported outcomes at that stage of the business, rather than promises about every shop.
The product asked merchants to improve a familiar activity. Many already used Facebook and WhatsApp on their phones; the challenge was to make business software similarly approachable. Peddisetty's explanation was straightforward: begin with activities people recognise, understand their frustrations, and make the benefit easy to see.
“We introduce changes in activities that are familiar to them.”
Abhinay Peddisetty, 2021
This is a fairly exacting standard for simplicity. A feature has to earn its place during a working day. A merchant with customers waiting has little reason to admire a complicated menu. The useful test is whether the task becomes easier to finish.
The ledger grows a second job
Bookkeeping became the beginning of a broader relationship. BukuWarung added digital payments, allowing merchants to move from recording an obligation to collecting money. It also offered online storefronts through Tokoko. A shop could make its goods visible through the social platforms its customers already used.
By August 2021, the company was adding digital products such as mobile credit, electricity tokens and electronic-money top-ups. These were additional things a merchant could sell. Alongside the software, its Komunitas Juragan Bisnis programme provided training in digital bookkeeping, online storefronts and payments.
The sequence reveals the ambition behind the modest entry point. Each addition sat close to an existing commercial activity: make a sale, record the balance, collect the money, offer another service. For Peddisetty, the long-term aim was digital infrastructure that helped Indonesian microbusinesses manage and grow their operations.
- 01RecordSales, expenses and customer credit
- 02CollectReminders and digital payments
- 03TradeOnline storefronts and digital goods
When the numbers got louder
BukuWarung joined Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch. In June 2021 it announced a $60 million Series A led by Valar Ventures and Goodwater Capital, bringing reported total funding to $80 million. East Ventures, AC Ventures, Quona Capital and Golden Gate Ventures were among the company's other backers.
The funding supplied a new scale of resources. It also came with a new scale of expectation. The company was expanding from the narrow job of maintaining records into payments and other financial services. Peddisetty's commercial background was now being applied to a business whose first encounter with a customer could be a free ledger.
By August 2021, BukuWarung reported 6.5 million registered merchants across 750 cities. Registration is one milestone in a relationship; continued use and useful outcomes require further work. The historical figure captures how far the company's distribution had travelled in roughly two years, while leaving the daily task of serving those businesses very much alive.
Peddisetty's own funding announcement spent time on one of them. He remembered meeting Ibu Ance, a mother of two running a coffee shop and a daily-essentials business who had expanded into selling gas cylinders. Her efforts to provide financial security for her family reminded him of his own upbringing.
He described the team's approach in unusually sporting terms: “to win by serving.” The phrase makes sense beside that example. Ibu Ance's expanding business supplied a concrete reference point for what service might mean. The funding total could fit in a headline. Her working life gave it a purpose.
The founder gets his own bookkeeping problem
As the organisation grew, Peddisetty also had to organise the people building it. A distributed team needed to retain conversations, find decisions and coordinate work. BukuWarung moved its internal communications from WhatsApp to Slack after evaluating alternatives including Microsoft Teams and Google Chat.
Peddisetty explained the choice in terms of asynchronous work, structured conversations and smoother workflows. There is a pleasing symmetry here: a company helping merchants organise their transactions had to organise its own exchanges. An all-company chat, like a crowded ledger, can contain the answer while making it difficult to find.
More recently, he launched a company-wide effort to identify opportunities for AI automation and document how work actually happened. BukuWarung built an AI team and worked on discovering operational workflows before automating them. The exercise returned to an old requirement in a new setting: understand the activity closely enough to improve it.
That is the useful thread through Peddisetty's story. A mother's shop, a restaurant's credit book, hundreds of merchant conversations, and the routines inside his own company all bring attention back to work as people perform it. BukuWarung began when he took an ordinary record seriously. The debt at lunch was small. The questions it raised kept him occupied.