Sekilo Killed Its Grocery App. Then It Bet Everything on Chicken.

The story of Sekilo begins with a spreadsheet that told an uncomfortable truth. In late 2022, the founders of a Jakarta grocery-delivery startup called Dropezy sat with their own data and realized the fastest-growing, most profitable slice of their business was not milk, snacks, or household goods. It was protein. Specifically, chicken. Within months they made a decision most founders avoid for as long as possible: they stopped defending the original idea and started building a new one.

That new company is Sekilo (YC Winter 2022), a B2B poultry processing and distribution business. Its pitch is unglamorous and precise: source chicken from producers across Java, process and customize it to a buyer's exact spec, keep it cold, and deliver it - anywhere from 25 kilograms to 20 tons at a time. The name itself is a wink at the trade. In Indonesian, "sekilo" means "a kilo."

01 / THE PIVOTFrom dark stores to downstream poultry

Dropezy raised a US$2.5 million Pre-Series A round in 2021, led by Forge Ventures, to build quick-commerce grocery delivery with dark stores in Jakarta. It joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. Then it did the rare thing: it kept the team, kept the investors, kept the batch identity, and changed the business underneath all of them.

The pivot took four years of B2C operations experience and pointed it at a heavier, less crowded market.

02 / THE MARKETA staple food, a fragmented supply chain

More than 270 million Indonesians rely on chicken as a dietary staple. Yet the middle-downstream supply chain that feeds the country's foodservice sector is highly fragmented. Caterers, restaurant chains, industrial kitchens, and government canteens typically juggle multiple vendors, which produces exactly the problems you'd expect: inconsistent quality, unpredictable pricing, and unreliable fulfillment.

Sekilo's answer is an asset-light operating layer. Rather than owning farms and heavy processing plants, it integrates procurement, processing, cold chain, and delivery into a single system, and coordinates the producers and logistics it needs. That structure is what lets it serve a small caterer and a large factory without running two separate businesses.

03 / THE CUSTOMERSWho actually buys from Sekilo

Sekilo sells to businesses, not shoppers. Its buyers span the spectrum of Indonesian foodservice, and the company tailors sourcing, cuts, and delivery to each.

04 / THE DIFFERENCECustomization as the product

Plenty of distributors move chicken. Sekilo's argument for existing is what happens to the chicken along the way. It offers SOP-compliant customization - marination, repackaging, and rebranding - so a buyer receives product ready for its own kitchen or shelf. It layers in flexible financing through fintech partners, and it holds Halal and NKF certifications, operating on ASUH principles (safe, healthy, intact, halal) with in-house grading.

Where a plain distributor stops at delivery, Sekilo stacks value-added services along the whole chain.

05 / THE SOFTWAREAI in the least digital corner of the economy

Sekilo describes itself as building an AI-powered halal protein supply chain. In practice that means applying software to the parts of the trade that have always run on phone calls and relationships: negotiation, pricing, inventory, and demand planning. The aim is to automate repetitive workflows and protect margins in a business where margins are thin by default.

06 / THE PEOPLEWho is building it

Sekilo is led by co-founders Chandni Chainani (CEO) and Nitish Chellaram (COO), who ran Dropezy before the pivot and carried its operations and supply-chain expertise into the new company. Chellaram was named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list. The team is small - around 14 to 15 people - which fits the asset-light model: coordinate a network rather than staff a factory.

Where does Sekilo fit in the market? Between the poultry producers upstream and the kitchens downstream, in the fragmented middle that almost nobody wants to fix because it is operationally hard and unglamorous. That is the space Sekilo chose on purpose. Whether software and customization can consolidate a trade this decentralized is the open question - but the company has already shown it is willing to abandon a working business when the data tells it to.