Permata, who was born and raised in Indonesia, has always been an overachiever.

“I’m born from a very simple family … we didn’t come from money, so I had to really earn everything that I wanted,” she said, adding that her parents were always strict and demanding with her.

“I was always expected to deliver, to be number one, to succeed academically,” she said. “I always liked property, because, living with very strict parents — [it was] my house, my rules. So, I thought I wanted to own my own house, so I could have my own rules,” Permata said.

She said she was studious, competitive and “always focused on academics” as a kid. By the age of 23, she had already purchased an investment property, the first of several.

Upon graduating from university, she went on to pursue an almost decade-long corporate career, eventually landing a senior vice president role at Southeast Asian on-demand services platform Gojek, where she met Pinhome co-founder Ahmed Aljunied.

After working at Gojek for about four years, Permata said she felt ready to embark on her own entrepreneurial journey.

“I think at the end of my time at Gojek, [the company] was operating in 200 plus cities in all of Indonesia,” she said. “I had worked with my CTO, Ahmed … [He] was always very entrepreneurial. He had built businesses before, and he [said]: ‘Why don’t we start our own?'”

So in early 2019, the two began ideating and building the business out of Permata’s home garage. Over the course of about nine months, Permata said she invested about $150,000 of her own savings into bootstrapping the company.

“My husband was my first employee. We had our first five team members working out of our [garage]. It was really like nine months of bootstrapping,” she said. “I was also working full time at Gojek, and it was still quite long hours that [I was working there], but we managed to squeeze in time [for our startup.]”

Informed by her own experiences as a property investor, Permata knew she wanted to address the many pain points in Indonesian real estate. She said the process of buying and…