East Ventures closes the year with Disdus investment

East Ventures is not going to end this year without some serious announcement for their Indonesian portfolio, as we receive a press release from Jason Lamuda, CEO and co-founder of Disdus. Disdus launched in August 2010 -together with 2 other similar sites- is one of the biggest Groupon clone in Indonesia together with DealKeren as incumbent players in the collective commerce scene. Their partnership with Kaskus in October boost up their visibility and gained new users from the mammoth forum, and apparently their partnership with the people behind Kaskus is only getting better.

As Jason stated via email, they have raised seed funding from Singaporean-based VC/Incubator East Ventures who has been aggressively investing in Indonesia's top notch and growing startups. Currently they have 6 companies under their incubation company from e-commerce, location based and mobile apps.

As a part of the investment deal, East Ventures' Batara Eto will be sitting in Disdus' board member together with Andrew Darwis (founder Kaskus) who currently on the board seat. This is a bit different from East's other investments where they don't (or at least they don't announce) one of their partners to join as the board member at the startups they invested in. And both Darwis and Batara Eto were CTO with strong technical background of building scalable websites, although it seems that what Disdus need is more of a business support as the competition goes tighter with new groupon clones launched every month, and of course don't forget the big mother Groupon is rumored to be here as well.

Here's the complete press release :

Disdus.com today announced that it has raised seed funding from East Ventures, a Singapore-based company focusing on Internet business ventures. As part of the investment, Batara Eto of East Ventures will join Andrew Darwis as part of Disdus’s Advisory Board. Andrew Darwis is better well known as the Founder of Kaskus.us, the largest online community in Indonesia, while Batara was Co-Founder and CTO of Mixi Inc., Japan’s largest social network. Disdus.com is a leading social ecommerce website in Indonesia that features a new deal every 2 days. Disdus was launched on 11 August 2010 and has since sold more than 12,000 coupons and reached over 70,000 users through various channels. Some of the deals include movie theaters (Blitz Megaplex), restaurants (Sushi Tei), Beauty and Wellness (Ritz Carlton Spa), Desserts and Café (Coldstone), recreational spot (Jendela Alam), etc. Pursuant to the agreement, both co-founders of Disdus, Jason Lamuda and Ferry Tenka, will continue to lead and maintain full operational responsibility of Disdus. “We are extremely excited to be able to work alongside the members of East Ventures. This investment will not only allow us to scale our operations, grow our team, but also gain expertise in the mobile platform space.” Batara Eto, a partner in East Venture, added, ”As an investor in early-stage startups, we recognize huge potentials in the Indonesian Internet market. We are confident Disdus has the vision and execution ability to be an industry leader in the online social commerce business in Indonesia.”