public relations

Best PR agencies in Indonesia for tech startups (2026)

The best PR agencies in Indonesia for tech startups, evaluated on tech specialization, verified scale, and real client relationships.

Enricko Lukman

16 Jul 2026 • 10 min read

Here's a hypothesis: the PR agency with the biggest media list is not the one a tech startup should hire.

That should be the obvious call. And yet founder after founder in Jakarta makes the opposite one, chasing a roster of contacts over a team that actually knows how to tell a startup's story to investors, press, and enterprise buyers at once.

Indonesia punishes that mistake faster than most markets. Get the cultural register wrong, time a launch against a religious holiday, or send a spokesperson into a TV interview with zero media training, and months of product work can unravel in a single news cycle.

So which agencies actually understand tech startups specifically, not just PR in general? Below are eight, evaluated on exactly that question, not on which one has the flashiest client logo wall.

Jump to each section:

Why Indonesia's PR landscape rewards specialists

Start with the basic geography of the problem. Indonesia is not one market pretending to be many; it is genuinely more than 17,000 islands, several hundred languages, and a media landscape split between Jakarta's national heavyweights and a fast-moving pack of digital-first outlets that often beat them to the story. Import a PR playbook built for Singapore or the US, and it rarely survives first contact with any of that.

Tech startups run into a sharper version of the same problem. A glowing writeup in Kompas or Tempo does very little for a fundraising narrative if the story underneath reads like a press release translated, badly, from English. Investors and enterprise buyers watching this market pay close attention to how a company shows up in Bahasa Indonesia media, not only in the English-language tech press that founders tend to obsess over.

The agencies that actually deliver here are the ones with real newsrooms and real journalist relationships inside the country. Not a satellite office. Not a regional template with "Indonesia" swapped into the header.

The failure mode is almost always avoidable. Overlook a religious sensitivity, or schedule an announcement against a major local holiday, and you've handed your competitors a story for free. There's a longer rundown of these missteps below if you want the full list, but the short version holds: this market rewards people on the ground who understand the calendar and the culture, not agencies running the same deck they used in Manila.

How we evaluated these agencies

Two questions decided who made this list.

First: can the agency's scale and client relationships actually be verified against something other than its own marketing, whether that's a Clutch review, a directory listing, or documented corporate history?
Second, and more important for this specific list: does the agency have a real, demonstrable relevance to tech and startup clients, rather than a general consumer or government PR practice with one tech case study bolted on for the pitch deck?

That second filter did most of the work. Plenty of well-known Indonesian agencies are excellent at what they do and simply don't do much of it for tech founders. They're not on this list because a strong CPG or FMCG track record doesn't tell you much about whether an agency can pitch a Series A round or brief a spokesperson ahead of a product recall.

Content Collision

Founded in 2015 by a group of former Tech in Asia journalists, Content Collision is the most tech-native name on this list, and it isn't close. The newsroom background actually shows up in the work: the team pitches stories the way a working journalist thinks about news value, not the way a generic agency deck insists a pitch should look.

Its client base leans hard toward tech startups, venture-backed companies, and B2B SaaS firms across Southeast Asia, and on some engagements it runs a performance-based model, which is still unusual in a market where the flat retainer remains the default arrangement.

The independent numbers back the reputation: 18 verified Clutch reviews, a 4.8 out of 5 average, with clients specifically calling out timeliness and personalized service. That is a rare combination for an agency this embedded in tech-sector storytelling, where "personalized" and "fast" don't usually show up in the same sentence.

It also runs PR campaigns well beyond Jakarta, with earned media work across Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and a track record of more than 5,000 media placements for upward of 300 companies. So a startup can walk in needing a single Indonesia press release and walk out, eventually, with a partner that can carry the same story into neighboring markets without a handoff to a different agency.

Best for: tech startups and VC-backed companies that want a PR partner fluent in Bahasa Indonesia media and investor vocabulary, with room to carry the same story into Southeast Asia and the Middle East later.

Fortuna (Fortune PR)

Here's an agency with a credibility trick none of its competitors can pull off: it is, itself, a public company. Fortuna, formerly Fortune PR, sits under PT Fortune Indonesia Tbk, the only listed communications company on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX: FORU).

The company's roots go back to 1970, and in 2002 it became the first Indonesian advertising agency to go public. That is more than five decades of institutional survival, which counts for something in a business where agencies quietly close every year.

The listing matters most for companies staring down an IPO of their own, or a funding round large enough to trigger real disclosure obligations. Fortuna's PR arm covers investor relations, crisis communications, and government-facing work alongside standard media relations, which makes it a stronger fit for a later-stage startup than a pre-seed founder with a demo and a dream.

There's a neat symmetry to it too. A public company's own financials, governance, and leadership are a matter of public record, which means a startup vetting Fortuna ahead of its own listing gets a credibility check most competitors simply can't offer.

Best for: later-stage startups preparing for an IPO, a large funding round, or any announcement carrying real regulatory disclosure weight.

Maverick Indonesia

Ask what actually separates Maverick from the rest of this list, and it isn't a media database. It's a read on Indonesian consumer behavior sharp enough that international brands trying to localize here tend to avoid the surface-level missteps that quietly kill so many market entries elsewhere.

The agency has been independent since 2002, and in 2025 became part of the One Asia Communications network, giving it reach across multiple Asian markets without folding into a global holding company. Its roughly 70-strong team has picked up work that straddles tech and consumer in an instructive way: Riot Games brought Maverick on for Indonesia and Malaysia, around the same time the agency was running campaigns for consumer names like Multi Bintang Indonesia. For a tech product that lives close to consumer behavior (gaming, fintech apps, e-commerce), that cultural fluency can matter more than sheer media reach.

Best for: consumer-facing tech products, gaming, fintech, and e-commerce, that need cultural nuance as much as press coverage.

PRecious Communications

PRecious Communications is technically a Singapore headquarters wearing a Jakarta office, founded in 2012 right as Southeast Asia's first real startup wave was picking up speed. What separates it from a generic regional shop is PRecious Sparks, a practice built specifically around growing startups and investment firms, kept distinct from the agency's corporate and consumer practices.

The firm has advised companies across the full startup arc, seed stage through exit, and its Jakarta presence gives it the same local media access as an Indonesia-only agency. But the regional footprint across Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand is the real differentiator for a founder who isn't just thinking about Indonesia coverage this quarter, but a Southeast Asia expansion next year.

Best for: startups that need Indonesia coverage now but are already eyeing a wider Southeast Asia rollout.

Weber Shandwick Indonesia

The relevant question for a tech founder isn't who owns Weber Shandwick Indonesia. It's whether the agency's healthcare and digital transformation work, grown alongside Indonesia's expanding private healthcare and enterprise software sectors, actually fits a health-tech or enterprise SaaS pitch better than a generalist shop would. It does, specifically, more than it fits a consumer app trying to go viral on TikTok.

The ownership structure is worth knowing anyway. The Indonesia operation runs as an affiliate under long-standing local leadership following a management buyout from its former global parent, which means it keeps network access to the Weber Shandwick name while decision-making stays local.

For a founder running a campaign that needs to move across several markets at once, that's a useful hybrid: local control on the ground, a bigger network to draw on when the story travels beyond Indonesia.

Best for: health-tech and enterprise SaaS startups that need both local execution and multi-market network reach.

Inke Maris & Associates

Inke Maris & Associates has been operating in Jakarta since 1986. Sit with that for a second: this firm has advised clients through multiple political transitions, an economic crisis or two, and the entire transformation of Indonesia's media landscape from print-dominated to whatever we're calling the current AI-search moment. Its founder, Inke Maris, built the firm's reputation on public affairs and government relations, and it still holds some of the deepest, longest-standing relationships across Indonesia's regulatory and political stakeholder base.

This is not the agency for a seed-stage consumer app, and to its credit, it doesn't pretend to be. Where it earns its place on this list is with tech companies entering a genuinely regulated sector, fintech, healthtech, anything brushing up against Indonesia's data protection or financial services rules, where government relations and crisis-readiness matter every bit as much as a good media hit.

Best for: fintech, healthtech, or any regulated-sector startup that needs government relations expertise alongside standard PR.

ID COMM

ID COMM has spent over a decade, since 2014, building a practice around a specific kind of story: the one where a brand's commercial goals and a genuine public interest angle actually overlap. Its client list mixes multinational corporates with international development organizations, and its executive director's past stint as APPRI vice chairman puts the agency close to how Indonesia's PR industry sets its own standards.

That development and public-advocacy grounding turns out to be a real asset for a specific slice of tech founders. A recent campaign for VinFast Indonesia, built around EV education and long-term consumer trust rather than a straight product launch, is the clearest example: this is an agency comfortable building a narrative around infrastructure, sustainability, or public-interest technology, not just a features list.

For a climate-tech, govtech, or health-tech startup whose pitch depends on being trusted as a long-term public good rather than just another app, that's a genuinely different skill set than most tech-focused shops offer.

Best for: climate-tech, govtech, and public-interest tech startups whose story depends on long-term trust as much as product buzz.

How to choose the right partner for your stage

Here's the mistake, restated plainly: founders pick an agency for its global logo, then get handed a junior local account team that has never actually run a campaign at their stage. A recognizable network name is not the same thing as a good team, and a smaller independent agency with senior people who pick up the phone will usually outperform it.

The question that actually matters isn't which agency has the biggest media list. It's who on the team will write the story, and whether they've done it for a company at this stage before. A great media list with the wrong storyteller behind it still produces a mediocre pitch.

A few filters cut through the noise faster than a generic comparison chart:

Stage fit. A pre-seed startup has no real use for an IDX-listed agency's investor relations infrastructure, and a Series C company facing regulatory scrutiny has no real use for a boutique's flexibility over a firm with actual government relations depth.
Sector fit. Fintech and healthtech carry regulatory weight that consumer apps and B2B SaaS simply don't. Match the agency's specialist practice to that reality instead of defaulting to whoever has the most recognizable client logos.
AI visibility, not just media placements. Ask any shortlisted agency how it thinks about brand visibility inside AI-generated answers, not only traditional search or earned media. A strong roster of AI-native PR tools can fill gaps here, but the agency itself needs a point of view on the question. A blank stare is the answer you're trying to screen out.
Who actually staffs the account. Not who shows up in the pitch deck. Ask by name.

Need help distributing your press release? Content Collision is a PR agency specializing in media coverage for brands across APAC and the Middle East. We have secured placements in 5,000+ stories for more than 280 companies. [Get in touch →]

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