CEO of Indonesia’s biggest tech company Gojek resigns two months after a $1.5 billion IPO

Indonesia’s biggest technology company PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk announced on Monday that Gojek Founder and Chief Executive Kevin Aluwi will resign to join the group’s board of commissioners to support senior leaders, Reuters reported. Aluwi co-founded Gojek over a decade ago along with Michaelangelo Moran, and Nadiem Makarim.

Chief Executive Andre Soelistyo would assume Aluwi’s responsibilities at the senior level and it would not be looking for a successor, GoTo Group said in a statement.

The announcement came just a month after the company’s $1.1 billion initial public offerings. As we reported back in April, the former e-commerce tech startup GoTo raised $1.5 billion in IPO to become Indonesia’s fourth most-valuable company at a $28B valuation.

GoTo said its group Chief Executive Andre Soelistyo would assume Aluwi’s responsibilities at the senior level and it would not be looking for a successor.

In a statement, Gojek Chief Executive Kevin Aluwi said: “After almost a decade of leading Gojek, I feel that the time is right for me to move to a less day-to-day role. “As a member of the board of commissioners, I will continue to be involved at a strategic level with GoTo management, and also have more time to explore my personal interests within the technology space.”

Goto Group was formed in 2021 as a result of a merger of ride-hailing-to-payments company Gojek and e-commerce giant Tokopedia.

GoTo currently has over 2.5 million registered driver-partners, 14 million registered merchants, and 55 million annual transacting users as of the end of September 2021. The merger helps Gojek and Tokopedia take on larger, regional rivals such as Singapore-headquartered Grab and internet company Sea, which operates the e-commerce platform Shopee and has a digital payments and financial services business. GoTo Group’s business now spans ride-hailing, financial services, and e-commerce.

Founded in 2010 by Kevin Aluwi, Michaelangelo Moran, and Nadiem Makarim, Gojek is an app for ordering food, commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, getting a massage, and two dozen services. It is Indonesia’s first and fastest-growing decacorn building an on-demand empire across Southeast Asia. The Gojek app was launched in 2015 in Indonesia and is now the largest consumer transactional technology group on a GTV-basis in Southeast Asia.