Sociolla Receives Series D Funding of 567 Billion Rupiah Led by EV Growth and Temasek

Social Bella (owner of the Sociolla brand) announced the acquisition of Series D funding of $40 million (over 567 billion Rupiah) led by EV Growth and Temasek. The ranks of new investors included in this round are EDBI, Pavilion Capital, and Jungle Ventures.

This funding will be fully directed towards recruiting more new talent and developing technology especially at So.Co. Add location Sociolla offline store will also continue to be carried out in the future, although the company confirms that there are no plans to expand abroad.

"Funding this is new Close last week. There are four new investors who have entered and one EV Growth investor has joined from funding early stage and become co-leads investors for Series D," said Social Bella Co-Founder and CEO John Rasyid, Monday (2/9).

Social Bella Co-Founder and President Christopher Madiam added, "Through the strategic partnerships we have with investors, we can continue to build a fast-growing beauty-tech ecosystem."

Last year, the company announced Series C funding $12 million (approximately IDR 169 billion) led by EV Growth, Japanese beauty platform Istyle Inc., and UOB Ventures.

Focus on developing So.Co

Social Bella has three business units, namely in the field of commerce (Sociolla), media (So.Co and Beauty Journal), and brand development. Sociolla itself is the oldest business unit because it has existed since the company was founded, as well as the biggest contributor to Social Bella. Although, the detailed figures are not mentioned in detail.

"All businesses run in parallel, there is nothing that we excel at. But indeed the commerce business has been running for four years, that is our main contributor," said Christopher.

"Therefore, GMV is not a metric of company achievement because we not only have e-commerce, but also have media. Which is different for the metrics in the media, not GMV. This is what makes our business unique," he added.

So.Co is a consumer database bank which is now one of the company's focuses to be developed. So.Co stores various consumer data, both from their profiles, transactions, and others that are used by companies to provide a better experience.

The concept of the So.Co application is therefore quite different because it is a combination of Sociolla and Beauty Journal. So that it is not only intended for consumers who want to buy goods online at Sociolla, but also for people who want to read reviews and other activities.

Christopher ensures that in the future there will be additional features that can improve the consumer experience for the better at So.Co. So.Co users not only end users only but also brands.

So.Co is also present as a consumer login tool before entering Sociolla's offline outlets to help them determine which products they need according to their respective skin conditions. The hope is that when they enter the store, consumers no longer have to fumble, what products are suitable for them.

Because the company wants to be an ecosystem, all technology is built by the company itself, including for POS machines in outlets because it has been integrated with So.Co.

"Even our warehouse is integrated with technology because we want everything to be one interconnected ecosystem."

Christopher ensures that all data collected by So.Co will not be used by the company to be monetized to attract sales. Instead, it is used to be reprocessed so that there is an increase in terms of user experience, so that it ensures consumer privacy will be maintained.

When you see from monthly unique visitors, John said there were about 5 million-7 million visits and about 1,2 million registered users. Cumulatively, there are more than 20,2 million visitors who have joined the Social Bella platform since 2018, either through the Sociolla, So.Co, and Beauty Journal sites.

From all the strategies above, it is expected to increase the number of unique visitors to 100 million users by 2021.