Kopi Kenangan Bets $200 Million to Triple Stores Across Asia by 2030

Kopi Kenangan is making one of the biggest growth bets in Asian coffee right now: cofounder and CEO Edward Tirtanata plans to spend $200 million and more than triple the chain’s footprint to 4,000 stores by 2030. That is not just a store-count story. It is a test of whether a Southeast Asian coffee brand built on speed, value and local flavor can move from domestic success to a real regional platform.

The company started in 2017 with a small self-funded shop in Jakarta’s Standard Chartered Tower, founded by Tirtanata, James Prananto and Cynthia Chaerunnisa. Kopi Kenangan’s pitch was simple from the beginning: occupy the space between expensive international chains and cheap instant coffee or street-stall brews. That bet paid off fast. In late 2021, the company raised $96 million in Series C funding and crossed unicorn status, and it said at the time that it already had more than 600 outlets across 45 cities.

The scale-up has only accelerated. By 2024, Kopi Kenangan was saying it wanted to become Southeast Asia’s largest coffee chain and was projecting revenue of $430 million by 2028. The brand’s core volume driver, Kopi Kenangan Mantan, is exactly the kind of drink that can travel without feeling generic: Indonesian beans, milk, creamer and palm sugar, tuned for grab-and-go service rather than slow-brew theater. That formula has helped it grow beyond Indonesia while keeping the brand rooted in local taste cues.

The international map is now wide enough to matter. Kopi Kenangan launched in Malaysia in 2022, entered Singapore, moved into the Philippines in November 2024, made its Australia debut in Sydney in April 2025, entered India with an initial 10-store development plan that same month, and then opened in Taiwan in April 2026, its seventh market. By early 2026, the chain was operating nearly 1,000 outlets in Indonesia and about 150 across five international markets, while Malaysia had reportedly turned EBITDA positive and was targeting 200 stores by the following year.

That matters because the real question is no longer whether Kopi Kenangan can grow fast. It already has. The harder question is whether it can build profitable international businesses while defending its affordable-premium positioning against Starbucks and a rising wave of local chains across Southeast Asia and East Asia. If Tirtanata can keep adding countries at the pace he wants, Kopi Kenangan will look less like a breakout startup and more like a template for how homegrown coffee brands take on the global giants.