In Southeast Asia, more than 90% of consumer trade still flows through offline channels across dense webs of distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and logistics providers that have evolved over decades. These systems are messy, geographically dispersed, relationship-driven, and resistant to superficial technological solutions. They are also critical.
Baskit has shown a rare ability to navigate one of the most difficult problem spaces in the region: B2B distribution of consumer goods. Indonesia is the starting point, and the underlying challenge extends across Southeast Asia. Many heavily funded ventures have tried to solve this with capital, software, or abstraction alone. Few have found a durable path.
The insight: operational mastery comes first
What drew us in was the combination of market size and market difficulty: fragmented demand and supply, uneven infrastructure, inconsistent data, and a persistent lack of trust between participants. Over time, both we and the Baskit team came to the same realisation: if you want to augment supply chains with financial services, you first have to digitise them. And if you want to digitise them meaningfully, you first have to master them operationally.
Many technology companies try to skip straight to the software or financial-services layer. Baskit recognised that in fragmented, low-trust supply chains, you need to be part of the distribution chain itself to build anything real. This insight did not come from theory; it came from a team that has collectively spent years trying to crack this same problem across different models.
CEO and co-founder Yann Schuermans led M&A at AB InBev and served as Country Head for Hong Kong and Macau, bringing deep domain expertise and a family background in distribution. Co-founder Yoonjung Yi also brings large-scale FMCG experience from AB InBev. COO Abhishek Pansari has spent years building teams and tackling difficult operational challenges across Indonesian startups including Ula and BeliMobileGue.
The broader team brings hard-won experience from companies like HappyFresh, WarungPintar, and GoToko — people who have experienced the complexity of distribution, marketplace, and e-commerce models in the region.
We are building a company that can define how offline commerce scales in fragmented markets. The next generation of Southeast Asian technology leaders will come from teams that are willing to master complexity, digitise it deeply, and build enduring platforms on top of it.
— Yann Schuermans, co-founder and CEO of Baskit
That depth of experience shows in how Baskit operates.
From distribution data to financial services
Baskit works directly with brands and retailers end-to-end. It manages retail listing contracts on behalf of the brands it represents, tracks which SKUs are being moved, and reconciles every transaction for both sides. This gives Baskit visibility over every dollar and every item that flows through the system, working with more than 60 brands and major retailers including Alfamart, Circle K, and Boots across Indonesia.
This control has also allowed the company to achieve profitability quickly. By managing unit economics from the start: working only with brands that fit its mandate, retailers that are reliable paymasters, and constantly adjusting operational details to optimise margins, Baskit has been consistently profitable for the past 18 months. In a category shaped by overfunded experimentation, that discipline is a strong signal.
With this operational foundation, Baskit has started generating information that the broader ecosystem lacks: real data on demand patterns, inventory flows, fulfilment performance, counterparty behaviour, and working capital needs. This naturally opens the door to embedded financial services such as financing, risk assessment, payments, delivered accessibly and at a fair price to brands and retailers that currently lack access.
At Cento, we are particularly drawn to businesses where financial services emerge from real-economy workflows. This is a pattern we have seen work before in Southeast Asia — companies that master operational complexity first, then layer on financial infrastructure, tend to build the most durable businesses. Baskit’s financial-services opportunity is compelling precisely because it is a natural extension of an operating system that has already proven itself.
We are not the only ones who see this. Baskit is already working with HSBC Innovation Banking and exploring embedded credit solutions with partners including Visa. For large financial institutions, mid-to-long-tail brands and smaller retailers are often inaccessible. Data is often limited, risk profiles are trickier, and the cost of acquiring such customers is high. Baskit is becoming a key lever enabling these institutions to reach an otherwise underserved customer base.
Beyond Indonesia
Indonesia is where Baskit proved this model. The Philippines is the next test of portability, and we believe the company’s relevance will extend far beyond its first market, because the structural problem it is solving is shared across the region.
We invested in Baskit because it is tackling a hard and important market the right way. It understood that operational mastery comes before digitisation, and digitisation comes before financial augmentation. It has paired that insight with the right team, real economic discipline, and the willingness to solve hard problems from the inside out.
Read more about Baskit here.