TaniHub's farm-supply and lending bet ends in license revocation and arrests

Farm-to-table marketplace connecting Indonesian farmers with restaurants and retailers, plus TaniFund peer-to-peer lending.

Indonesian smallholder farmers would buy inputs, borrow, and sell through one digital platform, with TaniFund P2P loans as the growth engine.

US$65.5M Series B in May 2021 led by MDI Ventures

TaniHub Group launched in 2016 to help smallholder farmers reach more customers. The idea: Indonesian agriculture was fragmented, with many small players and limited coverage, so a digital platform could shorten the chain between farmers and buyers and lift farmer income.

In May 2021 the group raised a US$65.5M Series B led by MDI Ventures (with BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Openspace and others), claiming 45,000 farmers and 350,000 buyers. It then pivoted from B2C to B2B and aggressively expanded TaniFund, its P2P lending arm. By 2024 TaniFund's loans were souring; regulators said it missed minimum-equity rules and ignored OJK recommendations. On 3 May 2024 OJK revoked TaniFund's license (KEP-19/D.06/2024): Rp520.9B had been disbursed to 295 borrowers, Rp122.4B of it unpaid, owed to 7,096 lenders.

TaniFund was forced into liquidation and the group collapsed. In August 2025 prosecutors arrested ex-CEO Ivan Arie Sustiawan, former finance VP Edison Tobing, and MDI Ventures CEO Donald Wihardja over an alleged US$25M corruption and money-laundering scheme tied to state investors' 2019–2023 investments in TaniHub.

Farm lending looks like demand but is credit risk: TaniFund reportedly used venture capital to cover loan defaults until capital ran out.

Investor discipline failed: state-linked VCs poured $65.5M into a young marketplace and its lending arm without stopping the slide.

The pivot from B2C to B2B plus embedded credit turned the marketplace into a supply-chain finance company, whose health depended on repayment.

When a marketplace funds its own growth with loans, credit risk becomes the product's risk: once defaults outrun capital, the marketplace and its lender are liquidated together.

As of September 2026 the group is defunct: TaniFund is in regulatory liquidation and the broader TaniHub business has stopped operations. The criminal case is the visible scar — prosecutors allege $25M of state-investor money flowed into TaniHub and TaniFund with irregular governance, and the detentions have become a cautionary tale for Indonesian VC.