wahu
Dutch-run circular plastic infrastructure in Indonesia: Smart Waste Hubs where people are paid for the plastic they hand in, then recycled into raw material.
Clean Ocean Collective · Netherlands / Indonesia
The situation
Indonesia produces around eight million tonnes of plastic waste a year. Only nine percent of it is recycled. The rest leaks into communities, rivers, landfill or fire. wahu exists to turn that waste into something people get paid for.
The company is circular plastic infrastructure, run from the Netherlands and operating on the ground in Indonesia. Households and collectors bring plastic to a Smart Waste Hub. Many of those hubs sit at Ahold Delhaize and Lion Super Indo stores. People are paid instantly to an electronic wallet. The plastic is then sorted and recycled into raw material, instead of leaking.
wahu already had the first part solved: 50 waste hubs, roughly 400 tonnes of plastic processed a month, a recycling facility in Jakarta, and a plan to reach 400 hubs by 2028. What it did not have was capital. No structure for community investors, no investment materials, no platform, and two founders busy building infrastructure in Indonesia rather than running a capital campaign. That is where Crowdpowder came in.
What we did
- 1
Design
Wrote the terms for the convertible loan agreement and set the funding strategy: instrument, round size, investor mix and positioning.
- 2
Materials
Built the pitch deck and the teaser deck, and sharpened the story until a stranger could understand the business in ninety seconds.
- 3
Platform
Onboarded wahu onto Eyevestor and designed the digital environment: company page, cap table, investor flow, all compliant before anything went live.
- 4
Press coverage
We placed wahu in Quote, Trouw and Duurzaam Ondernemen, all earned coverage, nothing paid for. The Quote interview led to an invitation to pitch at Quote's fortieth anniversary event. Alongside that, the client ran paid advertising in NRC and Nederlands Dagblad, eight Saturday placements across the two titles.
- 5
Founder-led marketing.
Neither founder posted much on LinkedIn before this campaign. We built the founder-led marketing programme for both of them, and posts consistently cleared 60 likes, with one reaching around 200.
- 6
Investor onboarding
We called interested investors personally and walked them through the process, so an interested reader actually became a registered investor.
What happened
The round closed fully subscribed at €1,000,000, the target wahu set out to raise. It closed in 86 days, inside the window of 90 days, at the pace the founders chose. 176 investors came on board: a community sitting behind the company, rather than a single ticket.
The round had a convertible loan agreement and a funding strategy behind it, and a pitch deck that could carry the story to a stranger. Earned coverage in Quote, Trouw and Duurzaam Ondernemen, with no press budget spent, led to an invitation to pitch at Quote's fortieth anniversary event. LinkedIn posts from the marketing programme led by the founders consistently cleared 60 likes, with one reaching around 200.
Worth saying plainly: the founders were in no rush. There was no advertising spend at the start, and the PR came later than we would normally schedule it, because the company wanted to build the round at its own pace. By pacing the campaign around press, paid media and outreach from the founders rather than rushing to spend, wahu built a round that matched its own tempo and still closed inside target. Push marketing forward and the same round closes sooner. That was a choice, not a limit.
wahu now has capital for the next phase of hubs, plus a group of owners who understand why plastic in Indonesia matters.