Desty Announces Additional Funding Led by Square Peg

Desty as a digital platform developer startup that supports social sellers, announced the acquisition of additional funding led by Square Peg. This investment continues A pre-series round announced in mid 2021. Then there will be an addition to the round at the end of 2021 with the participation of East Ventures, Jungle Ventures, 5Y Capital, and several others angel investors.

Desty plans to leverage its new funding for product optimization, team expansion and user acquisition.

“We are thrilled that Square Peg supported us with their extensive experience investing in comparable business models around the world. Indonesia has a very unique digital economy with striking fragmentation across merchant traffic, sales channels, payments and logistics. We firmly believe that our holistic approach to empowering traders with a range of enablement tools we will solve their problems most effectively,” said Co-founder & CEO Desty Mulyono Xu.

square peg is a global technology investment company that manages over $1 billion in funds and has actively deployed more than $200 million in Southeast Asia. Some of his portfolios include PropertyGuru, FinAccel, Pluang, and Doctor Anywhere.

“We wanted to partner with Desty, not only because of the attractiveness and customer satisfaction we have seen so far, but also because of the technical talent and deep market knowledge that Mulyono and Bill bring together (founder Desty). They have deep industry expertise and best practice experience that will help unlock economic opportunities for millions of small businesses in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia,” said Square Peg Partner Piruze soapcu.

Desty business growth

Over the last few months, coupled with the launch of new features, Desty has increased the capacity of merchants to handle transactions and has seen an average monthly GMV growth of 250% over the last quarter. Desty's solution is used by various brand, such as fashion, electronic retail, and culinary.

desty has also reached nearly one million users with 33x annual growth. Over the past year, they have upgraded several merchant empowerment tools and technology infrastructure such as Link-in-Bio (desty.page), Online Store Builder (desty.store), Digital Ordering Menu System (desty.menu), and Omni Channel Dashboard. (desty.omni).

It was also said earlier, around 50% of Desty users were sellers online, while 30% of users are creators or an influencer.

Services social commerce enabler

Services like those provided by Desty target perpetrators social commerce, either through social media or other channels. Market size social commerce in Indonesia itself is quite large. According to the Research and Markets report, in 2022, the market value will reach $8,6 billion and will increase to $86,7 billion in 2028.

In general, platforms enablers provide services to facilitate the management of goods and transaction systems. Some also help on the marketing side up to payment. Besides Desty, several platforms are trying to help perpetrators social commerce are SetToko, Avana, Minin, Tokotalk, and several others.