Francis Anugrah

Francis Anugrah is the founder of BRIK — having previously worked in Finance and Investments across Beijing, Singapore, London, Jakarta and Mumbai, a chance encounter to be seconded into one of his portfolio companies, a cement company in Thailand - Siam City Cement, gave him a first-hand insight into the construction industry and its lack of innovations therewith. His thesis is more innovation will have to come from heavy-industries in the next decade if it were to play catch-up with other sectors’ efficiencies. Most importantly, likely those innovations will not come from within the big companies that operate a near-monopoly in many markets, and that a new kind of hardware startups will fill in the gap.

Another serendipity that led to the founding of BRIK, he met with Accel’s cofounders, Prashanth Prakash, on a business trip to Singapore that told him about what is going on in the B2B space in India. A trip to India followed thereafter, Francis fell in love with the potential for technology-driven companies to improve lives.

BRIK is an Indonesian-based construction material aggregator that enables small and mid-size contractors to procure construction materials (2P model) from vendors. With a vision to maintain price transparency in a highly saturated market, optimize the supply chain, and supervise logistics; they’re transforming a traditional business practice into a modern one.

BRIK was born in May 2022. It is a direct-to-user (i.e., B2B and/ or B2B2C depending upon categories) construction materials aggregator that focuses on developing affordable and next-generation products for the booming Indonesian construction sector.

One of BRIK’s key portfolio products is a network of next-gen autonomous Concrete batching plants, where AI automation and process centralization allow concrete to be produced with zero human presence on the plants. This allows the plants to operate at maximum efficiency and process compliance, transferring the savings into lower, competitive prices for contractors. Further, BRIK is the only concrete player in Indonesia that uses >80% green materials as raw materials input for concrete — using waste processed materials from nickel and iron smelters to replace natural aggregates, and as cement replacement — reducing up to 30% of the “normal-level” greenhouse gas emission from concrete production.

BRIK is also currently developing products in the paints, coatings, and chemicals space.

A liberal arts grad from Harvard University, Francis spent his upbringing shuffling between Jakarta and Bali, Indonesia and Dalian, China. He is fluent in four languages and is an avid traveler whenever he has free time.