Indonesia has relatively incubators, angels and entrepreneurs with businesses of investible quality. Does the recent large investment in Tokopedia suggest the start-up ecosystem is now coming of age?

The emergence of Indonesian online marketplace Tokopedia is not only remarkable because of the relatively humble backgrounds of its founders - neither was educated overseas - but also because the landscape into which it launched. CEO William Tanuwijaya spent two years trying to raise capital before making a breakthrough in 2009. There were no incubators, few mentors, and even fewer local internet success stories to speak of.

At the same time the e-commerce space was filling up with a number of players bankrolled by large strategics; among them Plasa - a joint venture between eBay and domestic carrier Telkom Indonesia - and Multiply, a social e-commerce platform acquired by Naspers with a view to cornering Southeast Asia. More recently, Japan's Rakuten has entered the space while Rocket Internet-incubated Lazada is looking to dominate fashion e-commerce in the region.

Despite this intense competition and a paucity of start-up infrastructure, Tokopedia raced through several small-scale venture rounds as its consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform became the market leader, with 200% year-on-year growth rates and 2.6 million transactions taking place each month. The company struck gold - on paper, anyway - last October when SoftBank led a $100 million investment with participation from Sequoia Capital.

It is far and away the largest VC investment ever seen in the country's IT space. According to AVCJ Research, the next largest disclosed round is worth a mere $8 million.

For many in Indonesia, the deal represents a watershed for Indonesian venture capital. It gives industry participants confidence that the country has the talent and potential to deliver top-quality technology companies, encouraging entrepreneurs to build the next generation of start-ups and investors to support them.

Comparisons are inevitably being drawn between Tokopedia and its market-leading counterparts in Chinese and Indian e-commerce, Alibaba Group and Flipkart, even though the business models are not an exact match and Indonesia is at a much earlier stage of development. The energy and ambition is trickling down to every level of the market, conveying a sense that the early-stage ecosystem is entering a new dynamic phase.

"Since the Tokopedia investment by SoftBank and Sequoia, the game is has changed entirely," says Nicko Widjaja, an angel investor and program director at Indigo Incubator, a program set up by Telkom Indonesia. "A lot of VCs from outside the country have already set up bases in Indonesia, and they are looking at the country more seriously. What we are seeing now is quite different from when I started in this business back in 2011."