Ferry Unardi

Ferry Unardi (born 16 January 1988) is an Indonesian software engineer and business executive known as the founding CEO of Traveloka, an online travel agency and booking website; after working at Microsoft as a software engineer, he co-founded Traveloka in Jakarta in 2012 and expanded it across Southeast Asia until by 2022 it was the region's largest online travel agency, and he is a recipient of the Satyalancana Wira Karya award from the President of Indonesia ^{1 2}.

Unardi was born in Padang, West Sumatra, on 16 January 1988, into a family of Chinese descent that ran a small grocery shop he helped his parents with as a child ^{2 3}. Growing up in Padang, he developed an interest in information technology in high school through programming competitions, attended SMA Don Bosco in Padang until 2004, and then moved to the United States to attend Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, earning a Bachelor of Science in both computer science and mathematics in 2008 ^{1 2}. He moved to Seattle that year to serve as a software engineer at Microsoft, working on real-time media performance and reliability for Microsoft Lync, and while there took a trip to China, studied Mandarin and visited large e-commerce companies such as Alibaba and Ctrip ¹. In 2011 he resigned from Microsoft and began an MBA at Harvard Business School, then left it in early 2012 to co-found Traveloka ¹.

The idea for Traveloka came from the difficulties Unardi repeatedly faced booking flights while travelling from Boston to visit family in Indonesia; he contacted two Indonesian friends from his Microsoft and Purdue days, Albert Zhang and Derianto Kusuma, and the three left their jobs and studies to found the company in Jakarta in early 2012 ^{1 2}. The website went public in October 2012 as a flight search and aggregation service, became a full online travel agency in 2013, and added hotel bookings in 2014 ¹. In 2016 Unardi received the Satyalancana Wira Karya award from President Joko Widodo, and Forbes ranked him 27th in its "30 Under 30 Asia: Retail & E-Commerce" list the same year ¹. Under him Traveloka opened offices in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam; Expedia invested $350 million in 2017, when the company was valued above $1 billion; he received the ASEAN Entrepreneur Award in 2018; and by 2022 the company had expanded beyond travel bookings into lifestyle products and services such as attraction tickets, rentals, vouchers, credit and insurance ¹. No text read for this record names a faith for Unardi himself — the articles are silent and Wikidata carries no religion statement for him, and his Chinese descent and Catholic-school schooling are background, not attestation — so his faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2 3}.

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