The idea for JULO started thousands of kilometres from Jakarta. Its founder, Adrianus Hitijahubessy, spent roughly two decades abroad building AI-based credit-scoring systems for emerging markets. The recurring lesson of that work was uncomfortable: in country after country, huge populations were treated as "unscoreable" simply because no institution had ever bothered to measure them. When he moved back to Indonesia, he brought the problem home with him and, in 2016, co-founded JULO with Victor Darmadi and Hans Sebastian to solve it.
Indonesia is a nation of more than 270 million people spread across thousands of islands, and a large share of its adults are what the industry politely calls "underbanked" - people with thin or non-existent credit files who cannot easily walk into a bank and be approved for a loan. Traditional underwriting, built on salary slips and collateral, has little to say about a food-stall owner in Makassar or a first-time online seller in Medan. JULO's wager was that behaviour, not just bank statements, could tell you whether someone will repay.
"The company exists to give millions of emerging Indonesians a credit score they were never offered - and then lend on it responsibly."
JULO's founding premise
The product that grew from that wager is a mobile app - registered and supervised by Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK) - that uses big data and machine learning to assess creditworthiness in minutes. A user applies from a phone, JULO's models weigh a wide set of signals, and a digital credit limit is issued: today up to 15 million rupiah, repayable over roughly two to nine months. No branch visit, no queue, no collateral. It is deliberately unglamorous plumbing for a very large, very underserved market.
What makes JULO worth a closer look is that the inclusion story is backed by numbers that resist the usual scepticism about digital lending. By its ninth anniversary in December 2025, the company reported it had disbursed more than USD 1.7 billion in financing to over 3.28 million users - across every one of Indonesia's 38 provinces, from Aceh in the far west to Papua in the far east. Of that total, about USD 380 million went specifically to business capital: F&B stalls, online merchants and service shops. And its 90-day repayment success rate stood at 98.69% as of November 2025. Lending to thin-file borrowers is supposed to be reckless; JULO's data quietly argues otherwise.
