Singapore adtech startup bags $415k seed funding from VC firm SOSV

Singapore-based Bounty Media, an adtech and martech platform for advertisers and publishers, announced it has raised funding from SOSV and the VC firm’s program, Mobile Only Accelerator (MOX), to bring its total seed round to S$550,000 (US$415,000).

Photo credit: Bounty Media

Bounty Media was founded in 2019, offering a “zero-party” data platform for brands to provide premium content and incentives to their target audiences. Compared to first-party and third-party data, zero-party data is consent-based personal context data that customers intentionally share with a brand.

The startup has since partnered with over-the-top video-streaming services Vidio and Viu in Indonesia to serve the two firms’ collective 70 million monthly active users. Over this year and the next, Bounty Media said it plans to roll out its services across Southeast Asia and the greater Asia-Pacific region.

The development comes after Google’s announcement saying it will end behavioral targeting and profile-building in its ad products. This follows similar moves taken by Apple and Mozilla, both of which have been phasing out third-party cookies.

According to Bounty Media, this presents opportunities for advertising tech built on trust and transparency.

The stratup’s co-founder Claes Loberg said that with the advent of disappearing third-party cookies, “advertisers and publishers alike are searching for a new solution, and we suggest that solution should be to share the value of that data by offering a doorway through the paywall to premium content.”

A study by Forrester research shows that roughly 15% of brands will collect zero-party data in the upcoming years. Meanwhile, Asia Pacific remains the second-largest global ad market in 2020, spending US$101 billion in ads last year – a number that is expected to almost double to US$193 billion in 2021.