Lincah’s New Play: Building the AI-Powered Backbone for SEA Commerce

BANDUNG, Indonesia – November 25, 2025 – In a decisive move signaling a new phase of consolidation in Southeast Asia's booming digital economy, Indonesian commerce infrastructure platform Lincah has announced its acquisition of fintech startup Orderfaz. While acquisitions are common in the tech world, this particular union is less about a simple buyout and more about forging the foundational rails for a social commerce market projected to rocket past $100 billion by 2028. By integrating Orderfaz's seller-focused technology, Lincah is making an aggressive play to become the central nervous system for the region's millions of online merchants and creators.

The transaction absorbs Orderfaz's platform, technology, and customer base into Lincah's rapidly expanding ecosystem, which already serves over 23,000 merchants and 8.3 million buyers. This is not merely an expansion of market share; it's a strategic fusion of capabilities designed to streamline the chaotic, high-volume world of social commerce, where sales happen not on polished websites, but in the rapid-fire exchanges of WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

The New Operating System for Social Sellers

For anyone outside Southeast Asia, the scale of social commerce can be difficult to grasp. It's a vibrant, fragmented, and often manual ecosystem where relationships and rapid response times are paramount. In Indonesia alone, which accounts for over half of the region's social commerce gross merchandise value (GMV), more than 70% of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) use social platforms as their primary sales channel. These entrepreneurs face a daily grind of tracking orders across multiple chat apps, manually creating invoices, confirming payments, and arranging logistics—a process ripe for error and inefficiency.

This is the core problem the combined Lincah-Orderfaz entity aims to solve. Orderfaz, though a young company, gained traction by focusing intently on this friction. Its flagship 'Smart WhatsApp Keyboard' is a prime example of targeted innovation—a tool that allows sellers to review orders, send invoices, and share checkout links directly within the chat interface, drastically cutting down response times. It transforms the conversational flow of a sale into a structured, trackable transaction.

By integrating this technology, Lincah is essentially creating a unified 'operating system' for social sellers. Lincah’s existing infrastructure already provides an aggregation of logistics services and payment gateways. Now, with Orderfaz’s front-end tools, the entire sales lifecycle is brought under one automated umbrella. From initial customer engagement on a social platform to final package delivery, the platform uses technology to manage the complexity, allowing sellers to focus on sales and customer service rather than administrative bottlenecks. This is the practical application of business-focused AI: creating intelligent, automated workflows that boost efficiency and enable scale.

A Blueprint for Regional Dominance

Lincah's strategy is firmly anchored in Indonesia, the region's largest and most dynamic market. The company's leadership is using its home turf as a high-stakes testing ground to perfect a model it plans to export across Southeast Asia, with Malaysia slated as the next strategic entry point.

"Indonesia is emerging as the anchor market for social commerce in Southeast Asia," said Juan Lesmana, President of the group at Lincah. "By bringing Orderfaz's technology and seller ecosystem under Lincah, we are building a more streamlined, stable and scalable infrastructure that reduces complexity for sellers and enables them to grow across markets more efficiently."

This strategic vision is backed by a leadership team with deep experience in the very ecosystems they aim to serve. Lesmana himself hails from tech giants TikTok (ByteDance) and Tokopedia, giving him a unique perspective on both social-driven engagement and large-scale e-commerce platforms. The appointment of Mohamad Iqbal, a co-founder of Orderfaz and former executive at social commerce site Evermos, as the new Group CEO underscores the focus on operational excellence. Iqbal's direct experience in building tools for social sellers is critical for leading the platform integration and driving expansion.

This approach—proving the model in the region's most challenging market before expanding—mitigates risk and ensures the platform is battle-tested for the diverse needs of sellers across different countries. It’s a deliberate strategy to build a resilient, multi-market infrastructure capable of handling the nuances of cross-border social commerce.

Consolidating a Fragmented and Competitive Market

The Southeast Asian social commerce landscape is a crowded field. Global behemoths like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and TikTok provide the stages where commerce happens, while e-commerce giants like Shopee and Lazada are constantly integrating more social features. Alongside them is a vibrant ecosystem of local startups like Evermos, Super, and Raena, each carving out a niche. In this environment, standing out requires more than just a good product; it requires scale and a comprehensive, end-to-end solution.

Lincah's acquisition of Orderfaz is a clear move toward consolidation. Instead of competing, Lincah has absorbed a key innovator, integrating its specialized tools and capturing its growing user base. This fusion creates a much stronger value proposition. While a seller might previously have used one service for payments and another for logistics, Lincah now offers a deeply integrated suite that promises greater reliability and a seamless user experience. This strategy is about building a 'moat'—a defensible competitive advantage—not through a single feature, but through the network effects of a comprehensive platform.

The integration will not be without its challenges. Merging different technology stacks, company cultures, and customer data requires careful execution. However, the potential synergies are immense. By combining Lincah’s scale and back-end logistics with Orderfaz’s agile, seller-centric front-end tools, the new entity is positioned to outmaneuver smaller, more specialized competitors and offer a compelling alternative to the less-integrated solutions of larger players.

This strategic investment signals that the era of fragmented tools may be drawing to a close, replaced by a push for powerful, all-in-one platforms that can support a seller’s entire business. As Lincah prepares for its next phase of growth, backed by a need for long-term capital alignment to fund its multi-country roadmap, it is positioning itself not just as a participant in the social commerce boom, but as a key architect of its underlying infrastructure.