Indonesia’s captcha solution Karamel gets seed funding (UPDATED: Not yet)

(Updated on November 28th: While Bubu Ventures’ Dhanuwardhoyo and Rafly are now part of Karamel’s board of advisors, Karamel hasn’t closed the seed funding deal yet with Bubu Ventures.)

Indonesia-made captcha solution Karamel is revealing today that it has secured seed funding from one of the country’s newest VCs – Bubu Ventures. Karamel was named Gotcha when we first wrote about ¹ this anti-spam tool. It offers visual captchas in place of the traditional text ones, as seen below.

Users are required to respond to the visual captcha by dragging and dropping pictures into designated areas. Co-founder Aditya Putra wants to introduce a new online advertising term of ‘pay-per-question-answered’ which means that advertisers are required to pay a sum of money per captcha question answered. About one out of five Karamel captchas will show ads. What’s interesting is that Karamel will split 40 percent of the advertising revenue with the publishers.

The three-man Karamel team has been focusing on product development in the last nine months, but now they are ready to work with partners. So far they have closed a deal with 10 publishers and is still looking to find its first advertising partner.

The team first developed Karamel in February and received pre-seed funding from Telkom Indonesia in July. After launching in August, the startup quickly got attention from numerous VCs thanks to its fresh approach to the spam combat problem and closed seed funding this month. Putra explains that the plan is for this to become a more complete advertising platform, with captcha as one of its foundations.

Bubu Ventures’ strong connection in Indonesia could help open doors for Karamel. Bubu Ventures has also invested in two other unnamed startups so far.

(Editing by Steven Millward)