StickEarn raises $5.5m from Grab, others to take its vehicle ads to new places

Jakarta-based StickEarn has raised US$5.5 million in funding to take its offline-to-online advertising platform to new verticals.

The series A round was co-led by East Ventures and SMDV, the venture capital arm of Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas. Other participants included Grab, Ovo, and Agaeti Ventures.

StickEarn’s founders with one of their company’s adhesive car ads. / Photo credit: StickEarn

StickEarn provides a range of measurable advertising solutions for transport as well as for indoor and outdoor settings. In addition to wrap ads that can be stuck on the outside of cars, motorbikes, buses, and even aircraft, the company also offers “in-car retail” tech that allows taxi and private-hire drivers to distribute samples and sell consumables to their passengers.

These channels can provide additional income for the drivers, who get paid extra to drive their ad-adorned cars around target neighborhoods or, in the case of in-car retail, get a cut from sales or handing out samples. StickEarn tracks and analyses all of this, crunching the data to send insights back to the advertisers.

In a city like Jakarta, where commuters spend an average of two hours each day stuck in traffic, often in a vehicle they’ve hailed from Gojek or Grab, there are plenty of opportunities for brands to engage with potential customers through vehicle-based advertising.

This likely explains why Grab – along with Ovo, its investee and local payments partner in Indonesia – has opted to back StickEarn’s latest funding round. The ride-hailing super app launched its own vehicular advertising service, GrabAds, in August last year. Business-to-business advertising opportunities and the associated revenues could give Grab a boost as it continues its push for profitability as well as providing its drivers and other merchant partners with ancillary income. The Singapore-based unicorn has already partnered with Idooh in the Philippines to put interactive advertising screens inside its drivers’ cars and with US in-car retail startup Cargo to sell refreshments and beauty products to passengers.

StickEarn said it will use the series A funds to hire talent and ramp up product development. Some of the capital will be used to create more complex, multichannel advertising campaigns for clients, while the startup will also look to provide more data-driven campaign reports and market insights in the future.

The company operates across 31 cities in Indonesia, while StickMart – its in-car sampling and retail platform – is used in six countries in the region, further highlighting the opportunity it could open up for new investor Grab. It has worked with more than 300 clients and brands, including AirAsia, Canon, Tokopedia, Shopee, and Telkomsel, among others.

It previously raised US$1 million from East Ventures in its November 2017 seed round.