Desty Pockets Initial Funding from East Ventures, Develops "Social Commerce" Support Services

Infrastructure provider startup social commerce Desty announced initial stage funding with an undisclosed amount from East Ventures. Funds will be used for product development and boost user acquisition.

desty newly founded in October 2020. They are a digital platform that helps content creators, influencers, and merchants on social media create online destinations to market, sell their products and content.

Desty CEO and Founder Bill Wang explained, Desty was pioneered in challenging pandemic conditions, but he believes that digital acceleration provides an opportunity to grow. “Desty is here as a local, simple and free solution for online businesses to create landing pages and build online brands itself in just a matter of minutes," he said in an official statement, Tuesday (1/12).

Co-Founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures Willson Cuaca added, in the last year the number of online businesses in Indonesia grew rapidly because they opened online stores in droves. He saw that the Desty team, combining global and local expertise, was able to create a product that could attract the attention of thousands of users, in just a few weeks after it was launched.

"We are excited to work with Desty in helping millions of online merchants and content creators in Indonesia integrate their business across various e-commerce and social media platforms," ​​added Willson.

Desty has two products, namely Desty Page and Desty Store. Desty Page is a service provider landing page optimized for links on social media accounts, particularly Instagram -- the concept is similar to Linktree or Oneblink developed by MTARGET. While Desty Store provides a platform to open a store online easily, as a complement marketplace.

Even though it's only a young age, it is claimed that Desty has succeeded in attracting thousands of users, including online brands (Alowalo, Babycare, Notbad), content creators (Mindblowon Studio/Tahilalat), and an influencer from the culinary, travel, lifestyle, and fashion industries. The company has integrated with several important partners to add payment and logistics features to the Desty Store platform.

“Not only merchants online, Desty is used by various users to improve engagement with followers they. We also provide the best features for users, ranging from customizable templates to a complete analysis tool.”

Bill said that his party will use this initial stage of funds to accelerate product development and boost user acquisition. He targets Desty to be able to attract 100 thousand users by the first half of next year.

Bill Wang pioneered Desty with Eric Nathanael. Both have long experience in local and global companies, ranging from industriale-commerce, B2B, to telecommunications. Bill previously worked for 17 years at Alibaba, he was involved in the journey the tech giant evolved into AliExpress.

Momentum social commerce

According to the Econsultancy report with Magento and Hootsuite in October 2019 entitled “The State of Social Commerce in Southeast Asia”, the industry social commerce is projected to grow significantly. Southeast Asia has more than 350 million internet users and 90% of them are already connected to smartphone, as a result this opportunity is very promising to work on.

The cake has grown significantly during the pandemic and already previously discussed by DailySocial.

In Indonesia, these players offer a variety of simple technology solutions that make it easier for sellers to enter the digital realm. The players are Woobiz, TapTalk.io, Story, Super, Chilibeli, Halosis.

In fact, Moka released a GoStore that makes it easy merchant create an online shop site. Before investing in Desty, East Ventures also invested in startups social commerce named WeBuy last August.

other players, kata.ai, an AI and NLP-powered conversational technology platform, releases a dedicated platform social commerce and manage a business called QIOS. Through this platform, MSME players can create virtual assistants via WhatsApp to serve inquiries, payments, and delivery.

This platform is integrated with e-wallet (OVO, DANA, LinkAja), and logistics services (GoSend and Grabexpress). “Said… ai as enablers to help players in this industry be more thriving with intelligence technology,” said CEO of Kata.ai Irzan Raditya.