McEasy Hits Series B 🚛, Waresix Compounds 🚛, Pluang Goes Agentic 🤖

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This week's edition captures Indonesia's digital economy locking in another meaningful chapter across capital, infrastructure, and AI. On the deal side, I Squared bet big on Cella's cold-chain footprint, Waresix drew fresh conviction from Granite Asia and East Ventures, McEasy scaled its predictive fleet AI, and SMBC quietly folded its CVC arm into a more integrated model.

On the infrastructure side, Indosat teamed with Ooredoo, NVIDIA, and Nokia to launch Zankore, CoreWeave picked Indonesia for its first APAC data centres, and Pluang plugged Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini directly into a live regulated investment account. Add Telkom pressing on with its TLKM30 restructuring and a fresh Cube.asia read on how creator commerce is compounding across Southeast Asia.

Bali Tech Week 2026 is the definitive high-signal showcase of Indonesia’s entire tech ecosystem, offering direct, curated access to its most scalable startups, digital infrastructure pioneers, and key policymakers, all driving Southeast Asia's largest and fastest-growing digital economy. Learn more: https://balitechweek.id/

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• Waresix Raises $27.4M in a Fresh Insider Round Anchored by Granite Asia, Jungle, and East Ventures. Indonesian logistics tech company Waresix has raised roughly $27.4 million in a new preference-share allotment from existing investors, with Granite Asia leading at about $18 million, East Ventures adding nearly $6 million, and Jungle Ventures contributing about $1.68 million. The round follows the April IDX debut of Waresix’s subsidiary BSA Logistics, and takes the company’s cumulative equity raised to roughly $197 million since inception. Repeat conviction from top-tier Southeast Asian funds in this climate is one of the clearest signals that Indonesia’s logistics tech thesis is compounding rather than cooling. Expect further consolidation in this category as scaled operators build out end-to-end coverage of the region’s freight and warehousing stack.

  

• McEasy Closes $9M Series B for Predictive Fleet AI as Eftsure Enters Singapore. Fleet management platform McEasy has secured a $9 million Series B combining equity and venture debt, led by Integra Partners with debt from InnoVen Capital. The company reached EBITDA profitability ahead of this round and plans to deploy the fresh capital into Southeast Asian expansion and the predictive ML layer built on nine years of proprietary vehicle telematics data. The Series B funding will be used to accelerate the development of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies across McEasy’s product ecosystem.

• Pluang Rolls Out Indonesia’s First Agentic Trading Feature in a Beta-Controlled Launch. Multi-asset investment platform Pluang has quietly launched Pluang Agentic Trading, becoming the first Indonesian retail platform to plug ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini directly into a live, regulated investment account. Users can research, review portfolios, and execute real trades across stocks, crypto, and other asset classes through natural-language conversation, with every order requiring explicit user confirmation. The beta is currently whitelisted with public access targeted for mid-August 2026, and the build sits on top of Pluang’s proprietary Aura AI engine. For a platform with over 13 million registered retail investors, this is the kind of leapfrog moment that could redefine what a wealth-tech super-app looks like in Southeast Asia.

• SMBC Winds Down BTPN Syariah Ventura as Funding Societies Extends Its Institutional Debt Base. Bank SMBC Indonesia has completed the wind-down of its corporate venture arm PT BTPN Syariah Ventura following OJK’s revocation of the unit’s licence effective 5 August, with the mandate and activities folded into the broader SMBC Financial Conglomerate. During its life, the CVC publicly backed a single startup, rural-focused social commerce platform Dagangan. Separately, digital SME lender Funding Societies secured a fresh working capital facility from Malaysia Debt Ventures, extending a partnership that began in 2022. Both moves reflect how Indonesia’s digital-financial-services layer is quietly maturing into a more disciplined mix of institutional debt and integrated governance, rather than standalone experimentation.

• I Squared Buys Cella in Its First Indonesia Play, Targeting a 6x Warehouse Expansion. Global infrastructure investor I Squared Capital has agreed to acquire Indonesian logistics and cold-storage operator Cella from NWP Property and Japan’s CRE, marking its entry into Southeast Asia’s largest economy. The Miami-headquartered firm plans to scale Cella’s footprint from around 231,000 square metres to roughly 1.5 million over the next four to five years, funded through I Squared’s Growth Markets II vehicle. Cella already operates five modern facilities across Greater Jakarta and Surabaya, at near-full occupancy across e-commerce, 3PL, retail and FMCG clients. This is exactly the kind of long-cycle bet global infrastructure capital makes when it looks past short-term policy noise and prices in Indonesia’s structural cold-chain demand.

• Indosat Seeks $2B in Loans to Fund Advanced AI Chip Procurement. Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is reportedly seeking around $2 billion in loans to fund large-scale procurement of advanced AI chips for its Indonesian operations, according to Bloomberg. Citigroup has been engaged as loan arranger and is currently gauging syndicate interest across regional banks. The financing would fund GPU cloud expansion, sovereign AI capacity, and distributed computing infrastructure, accelerating Indosat’s diversification beyond traditional mobile connectivity which still contributes the majority of revenue. Taken alongside Indosat’s Zankore joint venture with NVIDIA, Nokia, and Ooredoo, this is easily one of the most aggressive AI-infrastructure bets ever made by an Indonesian corporate.

• Indosat’s Zankore Joins CoreWeave’s Indonesia Push as SEA Becomes the Region to Watch for AI Compute. Two AI infrastructure announcements landed in the same week that fundamentally reshape Indonesia’s compute story. Indosat has teamed with Ooredoo, NVIDIA, and Nokia to launch Zankore, an AI infrastructure platform targeting up to 1 GW of NVIDIA DSX AI Factory capacity, with a first-phase 200 MW build slated for H1 2027. Separately, AI cloud specialist CoreWeave announced Indonesia will host its first APAC data centres, with three new sites adding 360 MW of contracted power alongside a local operating team. Between these moves and Firmus’s earlier Batam announcement, Indonesia has decisively entered the global AI compute map as one of the most consequential build-out zones in Asia.

• Indonesia’s E-Commerce Marketplaces to Start Collecting Seller Income Tax from November 1. Indonesia has confirmed that major e-commerce platforms including Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Blibli will begin collecting income tax on behalf of sellers on their platforms, with the effective date now set for November 1. The tax office has said it will refund tax already collected during the earlier abortive rollout, and will re-issue collector appointments in a fresh selection process. The second deferral was framed as a step to protect near-term consumer purchasing power, following pushback from sellers and platforms. Once live, this formalises millions of MSME sellers into the tax net through platform-level withholding, closing a long-standing leakage gap and putting compliant merchants on a genuinely level playing field.

• Telkom Presses On with TLKM30 Restructuring, Targeting Six More Divestments by Year-End. State-controlled telco Telkom Indonesia has confirmed six more divestments planned for the rest of 2026, comprising two mergers and four business closures, as part of its ongoing TLKM30 transformation programme. So far the group has completed two divestments (including healthcare units AdMedika and Telkomedika, booking a $23.9 million after-tax gain), two mergers, and closed six businesses. Meanwhile, Telkom posted H1 2026 net profit of IDR 10.6 trillion ($591 million), with normalised net profit up 6% year-on-year and free cash flow up 12.8%. The message is clear: Telkom is quietly transforming into a leaner, higher-return company, unlocking value across its infrastructure, data centre, and fibre assets while sustaining core operating momentum.

A new report from Cube.asia and impact.com, published on 23 July 2026, argues that influencer and affiliate marketing in Southeast Asia are no longer separate playbooks. The two are converging into a single measurable growth engine as creators take on direct sales roles through trackable links, shoppable formats, and performance-based pay. On top of that, generative AI is emerging as a genuinely new product-discovery layer alongside marketplaces, search, and social. The region’s most powerful growth engine is not fragmenting under AI pressure, it is upgrading into something more sophisticated, more measurable, and more creator-led.

The report estimates that influencer and affiliate marketing are linked to roughly 32% of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce sales in 2026, or approximately $70 billion in GMV. That figure draws on Cube’s regional e-commerce data alongside consumer research across six markets and interviews with creators, brands, platforms, and commerce enablers. Consumers are already turning to generative AI for product research and comparison, but influencers and creators remain the strongest reported purchase driver, meaning AI is complementing rather than replacing the human trust layer. AI recommendations currently favour marketplaces and brand-owned sites over independent creator content, which introduces a new discipline the report calls Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.

For Indonesia, this is the growth engine compounding on top of the growth engine. Indonesia anchors Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market as its largest single contributor, and it is arguably the region’s most creator-dense economy, with TikTok Shop, Shopee Live, and Instagram Reels shaping how tens of millions of consumers discover and buy. Local brands like Somethinc, Erigo, and MS Glow have already proven that creator commerce works at scale, with livestream and affiliate integration now native to the shopping experience. As the convergence Cube.asia describes accelerates, Indonesian brands and creators sit at the front of the queue to capture a disproportionate share of that $70 billion regional pie. Combined with Indonesia’s growing consumer appetite for generative AI, evidenced by Gemini doubling SEA users and Pluang’s agentic-trading launch, the country is uniquely positioned to be the biggest beneficiary of both trends.