East leads $13m round for Indonesia's TipTip

Vertex Ventures, SMDV, BIG Ventures and various angel investors also participated. It comes eight months after a USD 10m seed round from Vertex and SMDV, Indonesian conglomerate Emtek, and several family offices.

TipTip was established in October 2021 by Albert Lucius, who previously founded local online-to-offline e-commerce start-up Kuko in 2014. Kudo received investment from East and Emtek among others and was acquired by regional ride-hailing platform-turned-super app Grab for an estimated USD 100m in 2017.

TipTip has built up an online and offline presence in 40 cities nationwide since officially launching in July and aims to take a hyperlocal approach in helping users create, showcase, and monetise content. It is said to have seen 20x growth in revenue since last October.

There are more than 2,500 creators and some 30,000 users on the platform; TipTip plans to reach 30,000 and 300,000, respectively, by early next year. Creators earn income by selling digital content directly or via TipTip’s promoter network, as well as by engaging fans through live sessions. On average, they earn more than USD 200m in the first month of use.

“We believe in TipTip’s creator-promoter-supporter approach, which is designed to serve the long-tail market of the creator ecosystem,” Joo Hock Chua, a managing partner at Vertex, said in a statement.

“The company is uniquely positioned to solve real problems content creators are facing, which is monetisation within their micro-communities. With the assistance of TipTip’s promoter network, the platform enables creators to monetize their contents directly without depending on sheer number of views or advertising clicks.”

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Consumer
• Media
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Indonesia
• East Ventures
• Vertex Ventures
• Sinar Mas Digital Ventures
• TMT