Indonesian Unicorn Go-Jek Acquires Stake in Philippine Bitcoin Wallet

Go-Jek, a major Indonesian ride-sharing provider has recently made a significant investment. Go-Jek is an Indonesia based Billion-Dollar Unicorn. Here, a ‘Unicorn’ means a privately held startup firm valued at more than $1 billion.

Go-Jek has bought a majority of the stakes of a Filipino cryptocurrency wallet Coins.ph. With that, the Indonesian company has made an entry in the Philippines market. Previously, Go-Jek attempted to get into the Philippines market but failed due to foreign ownership concerns. Coins.ph is planning to launch beta access to users in the waiting list for ‘Coins Pro’, its cryptocurrency exchange branch which is currently under development. Notably, after this acquisition, Coins.ph will continue to run as usual. Along with that Go-Jek has also declared partnership with the company’s payments platform, Go-Pay.

The specific details of this deal have not been clear yet, but it is revealed that the deal involves a “substantial acquisition” of shares by Go-Jek. Some unknown sources also say that Go-Jek paid $72 million for the shares as part of the deal.

Go-Jek was established in Jakarta in 2011 as a ride-sharing platform. Today the firm has been successful to process over 6 million transactions on a monthly basis, and most of them were processed by Go-Pay. It is one of Indonesia’s largest on-demand multi-service platform. With the most recent funding round, Go-Jek’s valuation reached between whopping $8 billion and $10 billion.

The collaboration will mainly focus on the Filipino market. Philippine is the country where 77 percent of adult citizens do not hold bank accounts. Plus, few citizens have access to other financial services. However, 70 percent of Filipino citizens use mobile phones, which indicates that cryptocurrencies can be operated here. On this acquisition, Ron Hose, the founder, and CEO at Coins.ph stated, “In just a few years, our team has been able to build a scalable service extending financial services to millions of Filipinos … Together we have a tremendous opportunity, and by leveraging Go-Jek’s resources and expertize, we can give Filipinos even more convenience, choice, and access to the services they want.”

Also, the CEO of Go-Pay Aldi Haryopratomo expressed, “We are excited to work with Coins.ph, a company that shares our ethos of empowering communities by bringing more people into the digital economy. Consumer transaction behavior in Indonesia and Philippine share many similarities, and together with Coins.ph, we hope to have similar success in accelerating cashless payments in the Philippines.”