Sociolla Gets Investment of 169 Billion Rupiah from EV Growth

Beauty products e-commerce service Sociolla announced a $12 million investment led by EV Growth, Japanese beauty platform istyle Inc., and an unidentified major Singaporean institution.

EV Growth is a fund new venture formed by East Ventures, Sinar Mas Digital Ventures (SMDV), and Yahoo Japan Digital specifically for Series B and follow-up funding. Fund It started operating actively in the second quarter of 2018.

EV Growth Partners Willson Cuaca in an official statement, East Ventures has supported Sociolla since 2015 through: seed funding. His party saw Sociolla's ability and readiness to win the category beautytech in Indonesia.

"Through this additional funding, we want to strengthen Sociolla's position as leading beauty tech company in Indonesia and coupled with the support of strategic cooperation with global istyle players," he said.

EV Growth Partner Shinichiro Hori added, "From a market opportunity point of view, we believe the beauty sector is very promising. Beauty technology has been proven by istyle in Japan and their support will bring great results in the future for Sociolla. We are looking forward to working with Sociolla ."

Use of investment funds

Sociolla Co-Founder Chrisanti Indiana explained that the company will use the fresh funds to develop a new platform Soco (Sociolla Connect) which was just launched earlier this year. Soco is a digital beauty platform that combines e-commerce with media.

This platform complements the two existing beauty platforms, Sociolla itself and Beauty Journal (a media site), by leveraging technology single sign on making it easier for users to access various content from Beauty Journal and UGC (User-generated content).

Thus users can manage their shopping at Sociolla and join the digital beauty community, getting product recommendations relevant to their profile and interests.

"Users who already have an account on Soco can also contribute as content creators and interact or share with other beauty lovers in Soco," said Chrisanti.

According to him, the existence of Soco itself will complete Sociolla's mission to help and shape the future of the beauty industry through technology.

Not only for Soco, the company will also use the fresh funds for their marketing costs which are distributed through Sociolla. The company will cooperate with popular beauty brands from abroad who are interested in entering Indonesia.

As of now, apart from the more than 150 brands that have been sold through Sociolla, an additional seven beauty brands from Asia and Australia have signed distribution agreements directly with the company.

The company also collaborated with one of its shareholders istyle by providing access to 14 million beauty product reviews from Cosme and the beauty site from the United States Make Up Alley. This site was previously acquired by istyle last year.

istyle entered Sociolla through series B funding in January 2017, previously the company received series A funding from Venturra Capital in November 2015.

Cumulatively, last year Sociolla managed to collect more than 12 million visitors to the Sociolla website or about 1 in 9 women in the company's target market in Indonesia.