BetterPlace forays into South-East Asia with acquisition of Indonesia's leading blue-collar staffing platform, MyRobin

JAKARTA, Indonesia and SINGAPORE, Feb. 6, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Asia's largest SaaS and frontline workforce management platform, BetterPlace announced its entry into South-East Asia with the acquisition of a majority stake in Indonesia's leading blue collar workforce fulfillment company, MyRobin, for an undisclosed amount.

Despite being a region with a high rate of digital adoption, the frontline workforce management space in South-East Asia has still not gone through significant digital transformation. The enterprises continue to work with fragmented solutions & a host of vendors to manage their blue collar workforce, resulting in suboptimal productivity. With close to 200mn frontline workers in SEA, the market size for frontline workforce management in the region is as large as $280bn making it the perfect market for a horizontal SaaS offering that provides all frontline workforce management services under one roof. BetterPlace, having seen success for its horizontal suite of services in India, aims to replicate the same in SEA.

Commenting on this acquisition, Pravin Agarwala, Co-founder & Group CEO at BetterPlace said, "Driven by the vision to optimize frontline workforce management for enterprises, a combination of consolidation and innovation was the right way to go about building the world's most comprehensive workforce management platform that exists today. As the largest player in Asia today, we are thrilled to welcome MyRobin to the BetterPlace family and further our vision towards formalizing the frontline workforce globally. With our technology and MyRobin's expertise in operating in Indonesia, we would be able to introduce equitable opportunities for the frontline segment."

With over 3 million workers in their community, MyRobin provides on-demand, pre-screened, frontline workers on a long and short-term basis to enterprises in Indonesia. In addition, MyRobin provides attendance and performance management services, and through their product MyWarung, offers embedded financial services like early wage and BNPL, and has its own frontline workforce upskilling platform called MyRobin Academy. Launched in 2020 in Indonesia, MyRobin has enterprises such as Shopee, Astro, Sicepat, E-Fishery, Kopi Kenangan among clients. The company has recorded a growth of 7X in 2022  and has had a direct impact on 44,000 families in the last 2 years.

Commenting on the partnership, Ardy Satria Hasanuddin, Co-founder & CTO at MyRobin said, "Over the last four years we have been able to empower over 3 million frontline workers in over 270 cities in Indonesia to live a life of dignity by elevating them to the formal economy and giving them access to formal finance, jobs, and training. As the next chapter of our growth we would like to take our vision and expertise to more geographies and BetterPlace is the perfect partner who will enable us to achieve this goal. We are delighted and excited to be part of BetterPlace and aspire to become instrumental in achieving our shared goal of creating a better place for enterprises and frontline workers across the world." 

With a robust business model, MyRobin had received funding from global investors including Antler, SOSV, Accion Venture Lab and Investible. This acquisition is part of a series of investments being made by BetterPlace to expand into the SEA markets. In the near future, the company plans to expand into Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines through both organic and inorganic strategies. BetterPlace recently raised $40mn as part of its extended Series C round which resulted in international investor Macquarie Capital joining the captable along with Jungle Ventures, Unitus, BII, Capria and 3one4 Capital.