After a string of high-profile fraud cases at Indonesian startups in 2024, venture capital due diligence in Southeast Asia had become a fundamentally different exercise. Investors who had once been willing to take founders at their word about market dynamics were now looking for independent validation of the assumptions their models depended on. When a VC fund was evaluating a Series A in an Indonesian B2B SaaS company, the founding team was credible and the product was real. The question was whether the market would behave the way the pitch deck said it would.
The company was building workflow automation tools for mid-market manufacturers and distributors in Indonesia. The founders described a large and underserved market, strong pilot engagement, and a competitive advantage rooted in the kind of local market knowledge that global providers could not easily replicate. On the surface, it was a compelling story.
The fund's concern was with the buyer side of the thesis. The founders were confident that mid-market Indonesian manufacturers would prioritise a standalone workflow automation tool over the ERP systems their IT teams were already being sold by well-resourced global vendors. That is a specific claim about how procurement decisions get made in a segment the fund did not know well from the inside. They needed to test it independently, with people who had been on the buying side of those decisions.
Nextyn was engaged to source buyer-side practitioners in the Indonesian enterprise software market, specifically procurement decision-makers and IT directors at mid-market manufacturing and distribution companies, alongside consultants with active mandates in the same segment. Nextyn's Jakarta team handled the initial outreach in Bahasa Indonesia, which was essential for reaching the operational management level of mid-market companies where English access was limited.
The brief was structured around two specific questions the fund needed answered: whether standalone workflow automation was being evaluated and purchased as its own category, independently of ERP procurement; and whether the local knowledge advantage the founders described was how buyers were actually thinking about their vendor choices. Over nine days, Nextyn facilitated conversations with five practitioners: two procurement directors at mid-market manufacturing companies in Java; one IT director at a regional distribution company; one enterprise software implementation consultant with active mandates in the same buyer segment; and a former product manager at a competing SaaS company who had worked directly on reaching the same type of customer.
The picture that emerged was more nuanced than the founders' pitch, though not in the direction the fund had feared.
Both procurement directors confirmed that workflow automation was a genuine and growing priority in their organisations. But the purchasing process was more fragmented than the founders' model suggested, and more dependent on IT departments that were already stretched managing ERP implementation projects. The buying cycle was longer, and the decision criteria weighted integration capability with existing ERP systems more heavily than standalone functionality. One of the procurement directors described a competing tool being selected over a better-featured alternative specifically because of its native ERP integration. Price was not the deciding factor. Compatibility was.
The former competitor product manager raised something the fund had not been looking for. Across the segment, there was a recurring pattern: high engagement during pilots driven by operational staff who genuinely valued the product, followed by a purchasing decision made at the IT or finance level where entirely different criteria applied. That gap between pilot enthusiasm and procurement reality was well known among people who sold into this segment. It was invisible in pilot engagement numbers alone.
The fund did not walk away from the deal. What the research did was sharpen the thesis considerably. The team went back to the founders with a specific set of questions: how they were building relationships at the IT level as distinct from the operational staff level, what proportion of pilots had advanced to IT-level purchasing conversations, and what their thinking was on ERP integration partnerships as a go-to-market strategy.
The founders' answers were substantive. The conversation that followed raised the fund's conviction rather than lowering it, because the founders demonstrated they understood the challenge the research had surfaced. The primary research had not disproved the thesis. It had made it more honest about what the company actually needed to execute.
Indonesia's B2B software market is real and growing. It is also genuinely difficult to research from the outside, particularly at the mid-market level where companies are too small to attract analyst coverage but too large for their buying behaviour to be inferred from consumer market data. Understanding how procurement decisions actually get made in that segment requires access to people who have made them or observed them from the inside. In a market where founder narratives carry more scrutiny than they did three years ago, that access is the difference between a thesis that has been tested and one that has simply been presented.
