FRESNOFORECLOSURE

In a tech ecosystem where many Southeast Asian startups are treading carefully, Sarana AI has accelerated — and quietly at that. Founded only eight months ago, the young startup has already posted over 300-fold growth in annual recurring revenue, attained EBITDA-positive status, and broken into eight sectors ranging from finance to education, all with a lean team of just eleven.

The Jakarta-born company’s performance stands out not only for its velocity but also for its method. Sarana AI returned its initial pre-seed investment within the same eight-month period, without relying on further capital injections.

“Our growth stems not just from what we build, but how we build it,” said Aktsa Efendy, founder and CEO of Sarana AI, in an email to e27.

A graduate of both Harvard and Cornell, Efendy is completing graduate studies in Boston while overseeing the company’s development. His decade of experience across venture and operations in Southeast Asia helped shape Sarana’s founding vision.

Internally, Sarana AI has taken unconventional team structure and work culture approaches. “We’ve intentionally blurred traditional tech organisation boundaries,” Efendy noted.

The company emphasises intensity over longevity in work hours. “We don’t romanticise overwork,” Efendy explained. “We optimise for density of output, not duration.” With a strict 5 p.m. clock-out policy, the team operates under principles that prioritise clarity, sustainability, and mutual trust.

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Sarana’s product development is equally deliberate. Given that AI applications must interact with sensitive internal data and processes, the company focused its early efforts on building trust. “AI is only useful if you are trusted enough to work with a company’s internal data,” he said. “Our onboarding and go-to-market approach had to reflect that.”

In this interview, Efendy explains the company’s philosophy regarding AI and how it plans to impact the ecosystem. The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation.

Your solutions focus on augmenting, not replacing, human capacity. How has this philosophy resonated with traditional healthcare, financial services, and property development industries?

Our philosophy lands well because it speaks directly to the real problems these industries are already facing. At a fundamental level, we believe every company is trying to solve two things.

First, in the short term, they want to perform better. We believe that the raw materials for that performance already exist inside most companies. The data is there, the people are there, and the experience is there. What is missing is the ability to connect those pieces fast enough, clearly enough, and repeatably enough.

At Sarana, we believe the atomic unit of a company is a decision, and the atomic unit of a decision is data. But people are not wired to reflect in real time or to scan across systems while staying focused on the task in front of them. That is where AI shines — not as a replacement for humans, but as a system that helps companies reflect on their data and outcomes continuously and without fatigue.

Second, every company faces the same long-term question: Can we keep operating when key people leave? How do we avoid having knowledge walk out the door? Succession is a universal vulnerability. Our AI agents are designed to codify institutional knowledge, capture business logic, and make decision-making resilient to turnover. This has allowed our clients to scale without compromising on continuity.

Because of this, our clients do not see AI competing with headcount or existing IT spend. They see it as a bridge to the future — something that multiplies the effectiveness of their current workforce and helps them avoid spending aggressively on headcount just to maintain performance. It gives them leverage, but it also gives them longevity.

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Our solutions have resonated deeply in the healthcare, financial services, and property development industries. These are industries where good judgment is irreplaceable, institutional memory matters, and the cost of bad decisions is high. We do not walk in and tell people they need to change everything. Instead, we ask, what if the people you trust could make faster, smarter decisions with fewer blind spots? What if your business could scale without becoming fragile?

And we try to live this philosophy ourselves. We are not building AI to remove people from the loop. We are building AI so people can do more of what they are uniquely good at — judgment, creativity, leadership — and less of what slows them down. Augmentation is not just a product feature for us. It is a belief in how good companies become great ones.

This approach has resonated because it meets traditional industries where they are, not where Silicon Valley thinks they should be.

Most organisations do not want to cut humans out of the loop; they want to make their people more effective, less burnt out, and more confident in their decisions. That is what we design for.

Many startups rely on continuous funding to scale, yet Sarana AI reached profitability and repaid its pre-seed investment within eight months. What does this say about your approach to financial discipline and product-market fit?

Profitability was never the goal per se; it was simply proof that we were solving real problems in a way that mattered enough for customers to pay quickly and stay committed. My background as a VC across several Southeast Asian funds taught me a hard truth about enterprise: there is often a long lag between early traction and actual cash in the bank. B2B sales cycles take time, implementation takes time, and decision-making inside large companies rarely moves at a startup pace. That means growth becomes nonlinear and unsustainable unless you are incredibly patient and extremely disciplined with how you allocate resources.

That is why we hire slowly, build with care, and obsess over what tips the scale. Being resource-constrained has forced us to become incredibly deliberate, not just about what we build but also about when and why. Our team culture reflects that.

When we talk about product-market fit at Sarana, we mean something very specific. For us, it starts by sitting in the client’s seat. We try to understand precisely how decisions are made, how operations are structured, what the CEO cares about, what the frontline deals with, and how it connects. We triangulate across management priorities, internal workflows, and unspoken norms. We aim to design AI that helps companies make better decisions faster, not just give them more tools. That takes empathy, not just code.

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We also learned quickly that while traditional software sells on features, AI needs to deliver outcomes. Our early playbook focused on showing results within weeks, not just activity, but measurable improvements in clarity, speed, and resilience. That forced us to apply first principles thinking on everything from implementation to onboarding to customer success. We had to prove that AI could compound trust, not create overhead.

And trust is not built in theory — it is built in motion. That is why speed is one of our biggest advantages. We have compressed traditional development timelines from months to weeks, from weeks to days, and from days to hours. There are many cases where we start discovery with a client in the morning, and by the afternoon, they are already testing a working version of the product. That speed not only surprises clients — it reshapes their imagination of what is possible.

But speed means nothing without outcomes. That is why we have never accepted the false trade-off between velocity and quality. We believe that every iteration should meet the bar for trustworthiness and business value.

There is a principle I often return to, inspired by Anna Karenina: all ‘happy’, high-performing companies are alike: they tend to share certain patterns — clarity, alignment, and internal coherence. But every underperforming company are ‘unhappy in its own way’ — struggles in its own unique way. That is why we personalise our approach to each client and each industry. The pain points may rhyme, but the bottlenecks, politics, and incentives are always different.

Profitability came because we respected those differences and moved fast enough to show value before scepticism could take hold. It was the result of a thousand micro-decisions made with discipline, curiosity, and urgency.

What is next for Sarana AI as it matures? Are you exploring deeper verticalisation, product innovation, or even expansion beyond Southeast Asia?

We still believe that Indonesia holds the largest and most urgent opportunity. The majority of institutions here still operate without structured systems, without institutional memory, and with significant gaps between data and decisions.

There is still so much whitespace to build in — not just across sectors, but within them. So our focus remains Indonesia first. We want to go deeper before we go wider.

That said, we have started exploring nearby markets in Southeast Asia where we see natural extensions of our existing work. Some of the organisations we collaborate with operate regionally, and that has organically introduced us to opportunities beyond Indonesia. We are approaching this carefully, with the same mindset we bring to product — prioritising depth, clarity, and compounding value over surface-level traction.

We are also continuing to go deeper into the verticals we already serve. This means building sector-specific agents that go beyond automation to deliver actual operational leverage. We want every AI deployment to create a clearer system, not just a faster process. Our goal is to move from delivering value in weeks to delivering compound value over years — through knowledge retention, better decision infrastructure, and alignment between strategy and execution.

At the same time, we are investing in the long arc of talent. One of our proudest initiatives is Sarana Camp, a hands-on AI engineering program designed to train and place vocational school graduates into high-impact technical roles. We built this not only to grow our team, but to help shape the future of AI talent in Indonesia. Sarana Camp is inspired by the belief that capability can be built — and that world-class AI infrastructure should not depend on imported expertise.

What is next for us then, is a deepening of our product muscle, our understanding of clients, our internal systems, and the team that makes it all possible. We are building slowly, intentionally, and with a long view — because we believe Indonesia, and the region around it, deserves software that helps institutions run with more clarity, more resilience, and more purpose.

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Image Credit: Sarana AI

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