The Corporate Venture Capitalist

Nicko Widjaja made MDI Ventures a CVC success story, now he plans more with BRI Ventures.

- Ardian Wibisono

There are only a few corporate venture capital (CVC) professionals in Indonesia. Narrow it down to those that have successfully managed a three-digit, in millions of US dollars terms, fund, and there’s only one name that comes up: Nicko Widjaja. For the past three years, Nicko has led MDI Ventures, a venture capital arm of the country’s largest telecommunications company PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom), to become arguably the best performing CVC in the country.

Starting in 2016 with a $100 million fund, the biggest fund in Indonesia at the time, MDI has since disbursed $59 million to 33 startups operating in 10 countries worldwide, worth over $70 million in valuation. The company has had five successful exits, including two IPOs. Japan-based startup Geniee was the first of MDI’s portfolio to go public at the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2017. While the most recent one is Australia-based software-as-a-service communications workflow platform Whispir, which started trading in June at the Australian Securities Exchange following an oversubscribed IPO of $47 million that valued the company at over $160 million in market capitalization. Last year MDI contributed to Telkom’s inorganic revenue of $1.6 million in capital gains within only two years of investment. Besides capital gains, Nicko says, MDI also generates total synergy value (new revenue generation and cost-saving) north of Rp 1 trillion. For instance, Kata.ai is the AI machine behind Telkomsel’s Veronika chatbot and Codapay is the direct carrier billing platform to purchase game tokens for Telkomsel. Telkomsel is Telkom’s cellular business subsidiary.

“These exits have proven that liquidity for a CVC such as ours in Indonesia is not a myth. The returns have generated sufficient value to instill confidence in our parent company to give us the blessing to do much more and independently,” Nicko says.