Bouncity, the location-based gaming platform, has been acquired by the Indonesia game publisher Qeon Interactive for an undisclosed amount. The move was closed early last month but has only just been revealed by Kevin Osmond, who was the COO of Bouncity. It isn’t really a surprise since we haven’t heard much about Bouncity in the last few months. In this deal, all of the startup’s shareholders exited except Jeffry Anthony, who has joined Qeon Interactive. Kevin says that Bouncity will still continue as a standalone company though he hasn’t heard any updates on this situation since he departed from there last month [1].
Launched one year and one month ago, Bouncity clearly had great expectations and was seen as one of the region’s strong products that could make serious revenue. It was even included in the three startups from Indonesia that pitched at Echelon 2011, when Bouncity was only one month old. The service reached 300,000 users in one year (right before the acquisition) and set a milestone of being the first startup involved in a nationwide campaign with Mizone that saw it being promoted in more than 7,000 outlets of the Alfamart group.
Qeon Interactive itself is a game publishing company which officially launched around two months ago focusing on bringing games from Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Indonesian market. At launch, Qeon introduced a first-person shooter online game called Shadow Company. Qeon Interactive is part of the MidPlaza group (which will add an e-payment system soon) and is supported by Biznet.
When asked what is the lesson learned from this startup journey, he answers:
Startups need founders who are strong, solid, ready to do the dirty jobs, and also share the same vision. Funding isn’t everything for a startup, but also requires good planning and great execution in order to achieve success. This experience is an expensive lesson to take.
With this acquisition, and Yahoo shutting down Koprol, plus other local LBS startup like this one, I’d say that such apps just don’t work here – except Foursquare. Now, Kevin Osmond together with Richard Fang (who has also quit Tiket.com) co-founded Weekend Inc., a design and technology studio which provides startup development and consulting services. They will launch a new startup early in August 2012, and I have a feeling it’s this one. Stay tuned as we will keep updated with the latest startup from Kevin and Richard.
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Update: This article originally included details about the Tiket.com’s internal structure which I mistakenly interpreted as being for public disclosure. This has been removed, and I apologize for the error. ↩
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