Digital advertising company Adskom raises series A funding from Geniee

Adskom, a digital advertising platform operating in Indonesia but headquartered in Singapore, announced today that it raised a series A funding round of an undisclosed amount. The round was led by Geniee, an advertising company from Japan. Two other firms participated in the round: Convergence Ventures, and existing investor East Ventures. (Disclosure: East Ventures is also an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page).

With the newly acquired capital, Adskom is looking to expand its programmatic ad services to mobile and video platforms, while also entering new markets like Malaysia and Thailand.

“Geniee has been working with us since last year, it is one of the leading ad tech companies in Japan,” Adskom co-founder and CEO Italo Gani told Tech in Asia.

According to Adskom, this is Geniee’s first-ever investment in Southeast Asia. “With this investment, we will continue to work together with Adskom through knowledge sharing and an increase of direct business transactions,” Geniee executive director Akifusa Kanda said in a statement.

It’s no wonder Japan has its eyes on the Southeast Asian digital advertising market, as the regional growth potential is huge. According to a recent study by eMarketer, in Indonesia alone, companies are expected to spend more than US$800 million on digital ads in 2015. An increasingly large amount of that will go toward ads for mobile devices, as more and more web traffic comes from mobile.

Adskom says its strategy has been to stay on top in terms of technological advances and trends, and to offer its clients a high degree of customization.

“Half of our company’s employees are engineers,” Gani says.”[Our clients often have] special requests for the platform. Big clients can demand localization, so we are ready to deliver that.”
In addition to around 50 staff in Indonesia and Singapore, Adskom has an R&D team of five based in the US.

Companies like Adskom are benefiting from the growth of ecommerce in the region, with an increasing number of well-funded players ready to spend large marketing budgets in order to reach their customers.

“As a performance-based advertising platform, and a lot of ecommerce investing happening in Indonesia, we are very happy,” says Gani. “We work with more and more ecommerce clients.”

When Adskom announced an earlier round of funding in 2014, it said it aimed to raise its total ad impressions from 500 million to one billion monthly impressions in Q1 2015. Asked about that target now, Gani said it was “still in progress.” “Quantity is something, quality is something else,” he added. “We focus on data mining and achieving a good cost per acquisition (CPA) for our clients.”

There are other ad tech players in the region, among them Adplus), which recently got acquired by South Korean company Yello Mobile, and Ctrlshiftl, formerly known as AdzCentral, from Singapore.