Wobe: Entrepreneurial tech for disadvantaged women in SEA

SMU political science graduate and entrepreneur Adrianna Tan is the founder of Wobe, a start-up that aims at enabling the entrepreneurialism of women in Indonesia. Wobe, a micro-business app with an e-wallet, is designed to make it easy to start a business selling prepaid phone airtime, electricity and water payment vouchers, and even bus and train tickets. Adrianna has consulted and worked for well-known start-ups such as Yelp and Uber, and also founded Pen to Pixel, a small app development outfit run out of Malaysia and Singapore after her graduation in 2009. She said that rather than a social enterprise, Wobe is more like “a tech and data start-up with social impact that’s very much focused on building out new business models for the bottom of the pyramid in South-East Asia, starting with Indonesia.” She hopes that through Wobe, she can achieve the end-goal where anyone in South-East Asia with a smartphone and mobile Internet can start a business.