Desty Announces Additional Funding Led by Square Peg

Desty, a digital platform developer startup that supports social sellers, announced additional funding led by Square Peg. This investment follows the pre-series A round which was announced in mid-2021. It is then followed by additional rounds at the end of 2021 with the participation of East Ventures, Jungle Ventures, 5Y Capital, and several angel investors.

Desty plans to leverage its new funding for product optimization, team expansion, and user acquisition.

“We are welcoming the support from Square Peg with their extensive experience investing in comparable business models around the world. Indonesia has a very unique digital economy with striking fragmentation across merchant traffic, sales channels, payments and logistics. We firmly believe that our holistic approach to empowering merchants with our suite of enablement tools will solve their problems most effectively,” Desty's Co-founder & CEO, Mulyono Xu said.

Square Peg is a global technology investment company that manages over $1 billion in funds and has actively deployed more than $200 million in Southeast Asia. Some of his portfolios include PropertyGuru, FinAccel, Pluang, and Doctor Anywhere.

“We are excited to partner with Desty, not only because it is attractive and we've seen the customer satisfaction, but also because of the technical talent and deep market knowledge brought together by Mulyono and Bill (Desty's Founder). They have deep industry expertise and best practice experience that will help unlock economic opportunities for millions of small businesses in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia,” Square Peg's Partner, Piruze Sabuncu said.

Desty's business growth

Over the last few months, coupled with the launch of new features, Desty has increased its merchant capacity to handle transactions and has recorded an average monthly GMV growth of 250% over the last quarter. Desty solutions are used by various brands, such as fashion, electronic retail, and culinary.

Desty has reached nearly one million users with 33x annual growth. Over the past year, they have upgraded several merchant empowerment tools and technology infrastructures such as Link-in-Bio (desty.page), Online Store Maker (desty.store), Digital Order Menu System (desty.menu), and Omni Channel Dashboard (desty.omni).

It was previously said that around 50% of Desty's users are online sellers, while 30% of users are creators or influencers.

Social commerce enabler service

Desty's services target social commerce actors, either through social media or other channels. The size of the social commerce market in Indonesia itself is quite large. According to the Research and Markets report, in 2022, the market value is to reach $8.6 billion and will increase to $86.7 billion in 2028.

In general, enabler platforms provide services to facilitate the management of goods and transaction systems. Some also help on the marketing side up to payment. In addition to Desty, several platforms that are offering similar service to help social commerce players include AturToko, Avana, Minmin, Tokotalk, and several others.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian