Baskit: serving Indonesia's middlemen builds a profitable 60-brand distribution OS

Baskit is a Jakarta-based B2B platform that helps consumer-goods brands run offline distribution in Indonesia, coordinating distributors, wholesalers and retailers while embedding credit and payments into the supply chain.

That offline middlemen are the channel to win: rather than bypassing wholesalers, sell them inventory software, sourcing help and embedded financing.

US$1.5M round in early 2023; US$3.3M seed (Jun 2023); US$4.4M Series A first close (Apr 2026) — US$9.9M total equity, plus a US$3M revolving credit facility from HSBC Innovation Banking.

Yann Schuermans, who led M&A at AB InBev and had a family background in distribution, founded Baskit in 2022 in Jakarta with Yoonjung Yi (ex-AB InBev FMCG) and COO Abhishek Pansari (ex-Ula). His view: supply chains make up 40–50% of Southeast Asian GDP, and although e-commerce was growing, more than 90% of trade still flowed through offline networks of wholesalers and retailers — so the durable bet was to digitize the middlemen, not cut them out.

Baskit raised US$1.5M in early 2023 and US$3.3M in June 2023 from Betatron, Forge, 1982, Investible, DS/X, Orvel and Michael Sampoerna, growing from about 50 wholesalers in West Java to a multi-category network. In April 2026 it closed a US$4.4M first close of its Series A led by Cento Ventures with Kaya Founders, Analog Ventures and Orvel Ventures — taking total equity to US$9.9M — plus a US$3M HSBC Innovation Banking facility, and announced the Philippines as its first market outside Indonesia.

Scaling with unusual discipline: Baskit says it has been consistently profitable for the 18 months before April 2026, works with 60+ brands and hundreds of distributors and wholesalers, lists with Alfamart, Circle K and Boots, and is entering the Philippines while layering embedded credit with partners including Visa.

Distribution-first thesis: with 90%+ of trade offline, Baskit bet the value sat with middlemen who already own retailer relationships, not with a D2C app.

Trust wedge: Schuermans's AB InBev background and distribution-family roots let Baskit operate inside the chain — listings, stocking, reconciliation — before selling software.

Data-before-credit: inventory visibility let Baskit underwrite working-capital financing that banks and P2P lenders could not assess, turning software into a lending moat.

Cost discipline: claiming profitability within about 18 months and raising a first-close Series A contrasts with the subsidized warung-digitization plays that burned capital.

Portable playbook: the Philippines entry tests whether an operationally heavy model built in Java travels before software and finance scale regionally.

Middlemen are infrastructure, not waste: digitize the relationship layer that already owns retail trust, then finance from the data; profitability beats subsidized growth.

As of 2026-04-20 Baskit was private and scaling: it claims 18 months of consistent profitability, works with 60+ brands and hundreds of distributors across Indonesia, and had just closed the US$4.4M first close of its Series A (Cento Ventures led) plus a US$3M HSBC Innovation Banking facility. Its next step is the Philippines — its first market outside Indonesia — testing whether an operationally heavy model built in Java travels, while embedded credit with Visa deepens. The open risk is that replicating in-market operations is harder to scale than software.