Deconstructing Indonesia’s MSME retail supply chain with Ula’s Nipun Mehra
Published on November 11, 2021
Listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.
This week, we’ve released an incredible podcast episode with Nipun Mehra, founder and CEO of Ula. This B2B e-commerce platform recently raised US$87 million in series B funding led by blue-chip global investors Tencent, Prosus, B Capital, and Jeff Bezos.
The MSME market has long been a core thematic vertical at AC Ventures. We believe the power of technology can create enormous value for the 63 million enterprises that make up this massive segment of the economy.
In this deep-dive episode, Nipun and Adrian Li, Founder & Managing Partner of AC Ventures share learnings of Ula’s journey and discuss the deeper insights from the MSME industry.
In this episode we cover:
- The origin story of Ula and how Nipun’s prior experience played a role in what he’s doing today
- How did Nipun break down this opportunity within the MSME space, segment the myriad of problems that they face, and use these insights to develop the Ula product?
- What are the nuances of Indonesia’s retail consumers that make Ula’s B2B2C strategy so powerful, especially with the dominance of incumbent horizontal marketplace platforms?
- What were the strategies and tools he used to scale the business over 100x during the Covid-19 pandemic?
- Where is Ula headed in the future?
About Nipun
Nipun Mehra is the founder and CEO of Ula, a horizontal multi-category wholesale e-commerce platform that combines the technology, tools, and skills of modern retail with the lean cost structure of traditional micro-retail. This brings the best in terms of selection, prices, and working capital to small store owners so they may increase their overall income.
Nipun has an interesting background working at some of the best-known names in e-commerce such as Amazon and Flipkart. He has also worked in venture capital with Sequoia India and was part of the leadership team at the payments unicorn Pine Labs as chief product and strategy officer.
