Singapore's TotallyAwesome raises $10m seed round

Yefira Group, a local corporate consultancy specialising in advertising technology, also participated. PFG and Yefira contributed debt and equity, respectively.

“It gives me great confidence that ‘venture capital for good’ is gaining greater traction in our world at large and TotallyAwesome met that brief for both institutions,” Will Anstee, CEO of TotallyAwesome, said in a statement.

TotallyAwesome enables a youth-safe digital ecosystem by curating the largest supply of media inventory for brands to engage with more than 500m monthly active under-18 users across Asia Pacific. It says its content pricing, curation, and moderation platforms create an internet experience that is safe for children.

The company is compliant with the US and EU data privacy guidelines for children, known as COPPA and GDPR, and is a member of KidSafe Seal Program, a consultancy that certifies content for COPPA compliance. The staff includes paediatric psychologists, influencer and content teams and a creative studio team.

The service – which helps brands connect with audiences across Asia Pacific – also incorporates live local language moderators as part of its content creation and curation process. This is said to ensure brand safety and emphasise human interpretation over artificial intelligence.

TotallyAwesome claims to have grown more than 70% a year for the past four years. In the past three years, it is said to have quadrupled its revenue and grown its staff by 200%. Recent operational tranction include the launch of TotallyPlay, a gaming platform that aims to facilitate child-safe marketing for brands.

The plan is to invest in data technologies and develop the enterprise advertising platform, while ramping up hiring in sales, data science, and machine learning. Strategic M&A will also be considered. Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, and Australia are targeted for expansion.

Under-18s are estimated to account for 40% of daily internet traffic, with some 175,000 children coming online for the first time every day. TotallyAwesome describes the phenomenon as a major structural shift that increases the need for a proprietary and contextual data-graph that the advertising industry can rely on.

The safe internet concept is seen as a major driver of investor attention in start-ups such Philippines-based Kumu, which has been called the “Disneyland of social media” and raised USD 100m as of last October. In this case, the start-up uses a community-driven content moderation model to ensure safety.

“TotallyAwesome is exactly the type of client we want to be associated with, one that is pushing innovation in the right direction within the adtech-martech [marketing technology] industry but most importantly with purpose at its heart,” George Kypraios, Yefira CEO, added. “This is just the beginning. Watch this space.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Media
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Singapore
• artificial intelligence
• gaming