2011, Jakarta. Marlissa and Lauri Lahi started Indosight — Indonesian insights — because Indonesia was opening up to foreign capital and the on-ramp was broken. The country was projected to become a top-five economy within a generation, but foreign founders trying to set up shop ran into a regulatory maze, a paperwork culture nobody had written down, and a fragmented vendor landscape where no one took end-to-end accountability. Indosight was the response: one team, in Jakarta, that handled the bureaucracy so the client could handle the business.
Then regional. By 2016 the patterns we’d built for Indonesia kept resurfacing in clients’ next moves — Vietnam, the Philippines, eventually Malaysia and Thailand. Each market had the same shape: real growth, real complexity, no clean playbook for foreigners. We opened our first office outside Jakarta in Bali, then Vietnam, then the Philippines. The brand stopped fitting — Indosight was Indonesia-shaped — so we renamed to Emerhub: emerging markets hub. The thesis didn’t change. We just had more proof.
Today. Emerhub runs offices across the six core SEA markets — Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand — plus the two we work in because clients use them to enter the region: Hong Kong and the UAE. We’ve helped hundreds of foreign companies set up and operate, and we’ve kept doing it the same way we did in 2011 — by treating complexity as the moat, not the problem. Our clients don’t pick us because their setup is simple. They pick us because it isn’t.
