The Jakarta proptech turning Indonesia's scattered rentals into serviced, app-managed homes - "a home that grows with you."
In most Indonesian cities, finding a place to rent has long been a matter of luck and legwork - a handwritten sign, a phone number, a cash deposit, and the hope that the Wi-Fi works. Rukita, founded in Jakarta in 2019 by sisters Sabrina and Sarah Soewatdy, was built to replace that uncertainty with something closer to a product you can trust.
The company manages furnished co-living rooms, apartments, and boarding houses under a single brand, then wraps them in services - cleaning, laundry, maintenance, and community events - and a mobile app that handles booking, monthly payments, and issue reports from one screen.
The pitch is deceptively simple. Rather than sell landlords a listing site, Rukita serves the person actually paying rent: the young professional, the student, the newcomer to the city. Give renters transparent pricing and real service, the thinking goes, and occupancy and loyalty follow.
That bet has carried Rukita from a handful of Jakarta units to a network spanning 21 cities across Java, Sumatra, and Bali, with more than 50,000 tenants served and 346 units under direct management inside a far larger marketplace of partner-owned properties.
Home That Grows With You.
Indonesia's rental market is enormous and fragmented - millions of independently run boarding houses (kost), apartments, and rooms with wildly different quality and no shared standard. Rukita's core work is to impose consistency: a Rukita room in one city should feel like a Rukita room in another, with predictable amenities and a predictable monthly price.
Customers are largely young urban professionals, students, and businesses booking accommodation for a minimum one-month stay. For them, the value is less about a single feature and more about the removal of friction - no haggling, no surprise fees, no chasing a landlord to fix a broken heater.
The problems it solves
Opaque pricing, inconsistent quality, clunky payments, and the loneliness of moving to a new city. Rukita answers each with standardized units, in-app monthly payments, on-call service, and organized community activities.
Booking, rent, service requests, and issue reports all live inside the Rukita App - the operational spine that lets a rental behave like software.
Furnished, serviced rooms with Wi-Fi, water heaters, cleaning, laundry, and shared facilities, bookable by the month.
Managed apartment units and residences for professionals and business accommodation, on flexible monthly terms.
Browse, book, pay rent, request services, and report issues - all from a single mobile app.
Property marketing service helping owners list, brand, and fill their units through the Rukita platform.
Financing solution offering funding assistance for property owners and business expansion.
Boarding-house listings marketplace acquired in 2022, extending Rukita's reach across the fragmented rental market.
Rukita blends two models. On one side it operates like a managed, build-to-rent business - leasing furnished, serviced residences it controls and earning rent plus service revenue. On the other it runs asset-light, taking a role across a marketplace of partner-owned properties it lists and helps fill.
On top of both sits a widening ecosystem: property marketing through RuOption, financing through RuFinance, and value-added tenant services. The through-line is the software platform that handles booking, payments, and operations - the layer that makes each new service cheaper to add.
Where it fits in the market: Rukita sits between traditional independent kost operators and hospitality-style managed accommodation, competing regionally with co-living players such as Cove, Flokq, RoomMe, and Mamikos.
Rukita raised a $15M Series B1 (IDR 234.5 billion) in March 2024. The round drew an unusually varied set of backers - a signal that a broad range of capital sees the same large problem.
Japan-based ESG-focused venture fund backing the Series B1 round.
Corporate VC arm of Indonesian bank BNI, supporting digital ecosystem growth.
NBA player joining as an investor among international impact backers.
Early backer continuing to support Rukita's expansion.
Southeast Asia venture firm and long-time portfolio backer.
Returning investors alongside real-estate veteran David Tsang.
Sisters Sabrina and Sarah Soewatdy launch Rukita to bring quality standards to Indonesian rental housing.
Rukita rolls out its app for booking, payments, and services across a growing set of managed units.
Rukita acquires the Infokost marketplace and introduces RuOption and RuFinance.
Rukita raises $15M with global investors and joins the Forbes Asia 100 To Watch list.
Rukita opens units in Medan, Solo, and Sleman and joins the FT High-Growth Companies Asia-Pacific ranking.