eFishery and the Trust Deficit: What Indonesia’s Startup Scandals Mean for Cross-Border Capital
Where the Headline Names a Fraud, the Structure Names an Absence
Close to USD 600 million of eFishery’s reported revenue did not exist. The Indonesian agritech unicorn had raised more than USD 294 million from twenty-eight institutional investors and cleared every layer of audit and diligence between itself and its capital. The fraud is the visible surface of a deeper absence: a market with seventeen unicorns and no disclosure regime for the private companies that hold most of its value.
Ground Truth: Indonesia | Saint Clair Market Intelligence | 25 May 2026
Based on published reporting by Kiroyan Partners, SSEK, Asian Legal Business, The Jakarta Post and The Diplomat, with regulatory context from the US Department of State. Saint Clair’s analysis follows.
In December 2024, a whistleblower’s complaint reached a board member of eFishery, an Indonesian agritech company that had reached a USD 1.4 billion valuation in 2023. The investigation that followed found that the company had reported USD 752 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2024. Roughly USD 150 million of that figure was real. eFishery had recorded a USD 16 million profit while losing USD 35.4 million. Close to USD 600 million of its reported business did not exist.
eFishery had raised more than USD 294 million from twenty-eight institutional investors, among them SoftBank and Temasek. Its accounts had passed external audit. It had cleared the diligence of some of the most experienced venture investors operating in Asia. Indonesia’s largest startup fraud was also one of its most thoroughly examined companies.
The eFishery story is compelling on its own terms, and that is the risk in telling it. Read as a scandal, it offers outrage and little that lasts. Read as evidence, it points somewhere more useful: a market that has produced seventeen unicorns and a digital economy approaching USD 100 billion has built no disclosure regime for the private companies that carry most of its value. The fraud is the symptom. The absence is the subject.
The Scale of the Fraud
For most of its life, eFishery was the kind of company a frontier market hopes to produce. Founded in 2013, it built automated feeders for fish and shrimp farmers, then added distribution and credit, assembling an end-to-end platform around an industry that employs millions of Indonesians. Its mission read well: technology in the service of rural smallholders. In 2023 a USD 200 million Series D round lifted its valuation to USD 1.4 billion and gave Indonesia its first aquaculture-technology unicorn.
The mission was also the cover. A story about feed efficiency and farmer livelihoods made eFishery a difficult company to doubt. It had raised a USD 90 million round in early 2022, at the depth of the regional funding winter, when most Indonesian startups were cutting headcount and struggling to close. A company performing that well at that moment earned admiration ahead of scrutiny. The investors who backed it were experienced and well resourced, and they were doing what the market rewarded.
The reckoning was quick. The board removed both co-founders in December 2024 and installed interim leadership. By March 2025 the former chief executive had admitted to falsifying financial data, with roughly USD 300 million in investor funds unaccounted for; Indonesian police detained him and two former executives in August. The figures at the centre of the case are now investigative record: revenue overstated by a factor of five, a reported profit that masked a material loss, a unicorn valuation resting on transactions that were largely invented.
The Mechanics That Made It Possible
The thoroughness of the deception is what makes the eFishery case instructive. The fraud was a parallel version of the company, built and maintained for years.
Published accounts of the investigation trace it to 2018. From that point eFishery kept two sets of financial reports, one for internal use and one for investors, and the gap between them widened as the company raised more capital. To make the investor-facing accounts cohere, eFishery needed revenue it did not have, so it manufactured revenue. A network of companies indirectly owned by the founder generated forged invoices and contracts and moved money in circles, a practice known as round-tripping, until the paper trail showed sales that had never occurred. Those same companies were presented to investors as eFishery’s customers, which made the fraud a related-party structure as well as an accounting one.
The fabrication reached past the books into operations. eFishery reported 400,000 fish feeders deployed across Indonesia. Twenty-four thousand existed. The fictitious revenue had fictitious infrastructure beneath it, sized to match. Published reporting on the case states that eFishery presented this fabricated documentation to its external auditors and to the diligence teams of its investors. Investors interviewed a former finance executive and recorded no concern. They engaged surveyors to confirm the company’s market position.
Each of those checks examined documents, and the documents had been built to pass. Diligence that verifies the paper a company supplies cannot catch a fraud that has manufactured the paper. The one test that would have exposed eFishery, a physical count of the feeders against the claim, sat outside the standard process, because standard process assumes that the operational reality behind audited accounts is real.
The Pattern Underneath
eFishery is the largest case of its kind in Indonesia. It is also the most visible part of a wider pattern.
KoinWorks, a fintech lender, disclosed a fraud at its KoinP2P subsidiary that cost roughly Rp 365 billion, about USD 23 million, and exposed weaknesses in the company’s financial controls. Through 2025 the picture widened further. Corruption probes reached the venture arms of state-owned enterprises, where investigators alleged that investment rules had been breached in funding channelled to a now-defunct agritech company. A former banker quoted in the reporting on eFishery, a person with direct knowledge of the market, said he was aware of at least two other major Indonesian startups that had manipulated their accounts.
The market read the cluster correctly. Indonesian startup funding fell roughly ninety per cent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the eFishery disclosure. Private funding in the first half of 2025 came in below USD 80 million, against around USD 200 million in the same period of 2024. Some investment firms moved capital toward Vietnam and the Philippines; others stepped back from technology altogether.
The more durable change is in how diligence is done. Roderick Purwana, managing partner at the venture firm East Ventures, told The Jakarta Post in December 2025 that investor risk appetite remained intact but the bar had risen, and that diligence had become “deeper and more forensic”. Financial controls, revenue quality, related-party exposure and cash discipline are now examined earlier in a deal. Capital is still available; it is released more slowly and questioned more closely. For a market that had priced governance as a procedural cost, that is a structural correction, and a healthy one.
The Structural Void
The post-mortems on eFishery converge on weak governance and lax oversight. That diagnosis is correct, and it stops one level short of the structural point.
eFishery was a private company, and in Indonesia a private company carries no obligation to publish audited financial statements, whatever the capital it holds or the number of institutions exposed to it. A firm valued at USD 1.4 billion and funded by twenty-eight investors sat under the same disclosure regime as a corner shop. The investor-facing accounts were the only accounts most stakeholders ever saw, and those were the accounts the company itself controlled. Public-market reporting standards exist precisely to take that control away from the company and hand it to an independent regime. Indonesia has built no equivalent for late-stage private firms, and most of the value in its startup sector now sits inside exactly those firms.
The gap is legal, which means it can be closed. SSEK, the Indonesian law firm, set out the remedy in concrete terms after the case broke: mandatory financial disclosure for companies above a certain scale, and clearer obligations to disclose conflicts of interest where executives hold ownership stakes in related companies. That second point describes the eFishery round-tripping structure exactly. The instrument that would have made the fraud visible is a disclosure rule Indonesia has not yet written.
The institution that might have supplied a counterweight has moved the other way. The Corruption Eradication Commission, Indonesia’s anti-corruption agency, had its independence reduced by a 2019 law that limited its ability to investigate without political interference; investigations and prosecutions fell, and criminal-code revisions taking effect in 2026 reduce the penalties for corruption. Across the same decade in which Indonesia produced seventeen unicorns, the architecture that polices financial misconduct was weakened. The disclosure void and the supervisory gap are structural features of this market.
There is a second cost, and it is the one the headline figures miss. The capital already lost in eFishery is finite and largely written down. The capital that now routes around Indonesia is open-ended. Analysing the case, Kiroyan Partners warned that the erosion of trust could deter foreign investors, major banking institutions in particular, from treating Indonesia as a destination. A single fraud is a closed event. A reputation for undetectable fraud is a recurring tax on every future allocation, and it is paid by every honest founder in the market.
The Corridor View
Indonesia’s startup sector will keep producing companies worth backing. The scale this series described a week ago is real: 283 million people and a digital economy approaching USD 100 billion. None of that is in question. What the eFishery year changed is the price of trust.
For most of the past decade, the market treated governance as a cost of doing business: a diligence checklist, an audit fee, a box confirmed before the capital moved. eFishery reframed it. In a market without a disclosure regime, governance is the layer the investor has to supply, because the state does not supply it. The firms that can supply it credibly hold an advantage the market has only begun to price.
This is where European institutional capital holds an under-recognised position. European investors carry governance as standard practice: operating-board discipline, independent audit trails, related-party scrutiny, unit-economics rigour applied before the capital commits. In Frankfurt or Amsterdam that is unremarkable, the ordinary cost of managing other people’s money. In post-eFishery Indonesia it is a differentiator, and a durable one, because it cannot be assembled quickly by a competitor who has never built it.
The market is already correcting. Investors have raised the bar, and diligence has become more forensic. Fore Coffee, a tech-enabled chain, completed an initial public offering in April 2025, and one of its backers said plainly that disciplined execution and governance were what made the listing possible. The correction is under way; it is not complete, and it will not complete itself.
The investable insight is straightforward. The capital Indonesia most needs now is capital that arrives with governance already attached. For the European institution with an ASEAN remit, that is the opening.
Sources:
Rahmad Budi Harto and Beringin Kusuma, “Hard Lessons from eFishery’s Fishy Business,” Kiroyan Partners / Stratsea (30 April 2025). kiroyan-partners.com
“Could the eFishery Scandal Be a Wake-Up Call for Indonesia’s Startup Ecosystem?”, Asian Legal Business, featuring analysis from SSEK (March 2025).
Arif Perdana, “eFishery Scandal Exposes Weak Governance in Indonesia’s Tech Start-ups,” The Jakarta Post (31 January 2025). thejakartapost.com
James Guild, “The Financial Scandal at Indonesian Tech Unicorn eFishery, Explained,” The Diplomat (February 2025). thediplomat.com
Ruth Dea Juwita, “Indonesia’s Start-up Scandals in 2025 Force Investors to Raise the Bar, Change Playbooks,” The Jakarta Post / Asia News Network (January 2026). asianews.network
US Department of State, 2025 Investment Climate Statement: Indonesia (2025).
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Saint Clair has an active engagement with frontier Asian startup ecosystems and may have commercial interests in markets discussed. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.
About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.
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