Desty Bags 46 Billion Rupiah Pre-Series A Led by 5Y Capital

Desty micro site provider startup announced a pre-series A funding round worth of $3.2 million or around 46 billion rupiah. The new funding was led by 5Y Capital. Some investors also participated, including Fosun RZ Capital, January Capital, IN Capital, and East Ventures.

For further information, 5Y Capital is a China-based VC (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) that focuses on early-stage funding. 5Y Capital has invested in Xiaomi and Kuaishou. Currently, Desty is 5Y Capital's first investment portfolio in Indonesia.

Desty is a digital platform that helps content creators, influencers and sellers on social media to market and sell their products. Users can create a mini site placed on a social media bio link or online store for free in just a few minutes. The concept is similar to Linktree with broader features.

Desty was founded in October 2020 by Mulyono Xu (CEO) and Bill Wang (COO). Both have experience and expertise in building e-commerce for 17 years under the Alibaba Group. The startup has previously secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from East Ventures.

Through this additional investment, the company is still focused on increasing the number of teams and its user base. Xu said, Desty team is currently backed by talents with working experience in giant technology companies, from Alibaba, Facebook, Google, and Bukalapak.

In addition, he said, Desty also continues to ensure that sellers who have joined its ecosystem can develop their business efficiently. The platform is said to have been used by hundreds of thousands of users. Especially in the Covid-19 pandemic situation, sellers or merchants should be able to adapt to manage their business digitally.

"We've seen Desty's exponential growth at the right time due to the rapid growth of e-commerce in Indonesia during the pandemic. Therefore, we believe merchants need various options for where to shop for consumers, either through marketplaces, independent websites, or social media," Xu said.

East Ventures' Co-founder & Managing Partner, Willson Cuaca agreed on this. He said, the pandemic has had a positive impact in accelerating digital adoption to the wider community. Desty is considered to have paved the way for merchants, influencers, and creators to start digitizing product sales digitally.

Based on data compiled by Desty from several sources, the number of e-commerce transactions jumped 18.1% to 98.3 million with an additional 12 million new users throughout 2020. Indonesian people has three main destinations to shop, marketplaces (97%) ), independent business domain/website (91%), and social media (82%).

5Y Capital's VP of Investment, Hanson Hu added that links are very important key in the internet ecosystem as they can bring people together, online with offline, and demand with supply.

"In terms of e-commerce, links open up great opportunities in connecting social and content with e-commerce transactions as we have seen this trend in China. We believe Desty can become the infrastructure for links in Southeast Asia's e-commerce industry. Therefore, its presence can contribute to creating a closer content, social and e-commerce ecosystem," he added.

Currently, Desty offers two main products, Desty Page and Desty Store. Desty Page is a landing page service to optimize the link feature on social media accounts, especially Instagram. Meanwhile, Desty Store is a complement to the marketplace channel that provides a platform to help users easily open online stores.

As a supporting product, Desty also developed Desty Academy as an information and training center for users who want to develop their business.