Loket raises series A funding to manage events in Indonesia better

Indonesian event management tech company Loket announced today that it has raised a series A round of funding from Sovereign’s Capital and East Ventures. The amount was undisclosed.

Loket was founded three years ago and is part online ticket booking, part event management software. It distributes radio-frequency identification (RFID) wristbands – attendees wear them and this lets the organizer identify them when they pass through access gates. The tech also lets event organizers monitor crew, enables cashless payments, and gathers information about attendee behavior.

It offers this to its clients as an end-to-end service – it’s not like Eventbrite or similar companies that let organizers upload events, sell tickets, and analyze data on their own.

Instead, Loket manages the whole process, from creating a custom website built on top of its ticketing software, to helping sell tickets through various online channels and writing reports after the event.

Loket co-founder and CEO Edy Sulistyo chose this model because he thinks the Indonesian market isn’t quite ready yet for a fully automated platform à la Eventbrite.

He actually built a company called eEvent which was more similar to the Eventbrite concept before Loket, and eventually sold it to a marketing agency in the US. That experience taught him a lot about what he thought would work best in Indonesia.

“Eventually we will turn into a self-service platform, that’s perhaps two or three years down the line, just not yet,” Edy explains. “But the system is already designed that way.”

500,000 bracelets in 2016

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Loket claims to be the largest purveyor of RFID bracelets in Southeast Asia, with its main market being Indonesia.

It says it has already distributed more than 500,000 RFID bracelets in the archipelago in the first half of 2016, and that it has worked on A-list events such as a Katy Perry and a One Direction concert, the Indonesian Basketball League, Jakarta Comic Con, and others.

The firm says about 80 percent of all big-name live music events in Indonesia use its tech.

Edy says that the startup is already cash-flow positive, so that the investment was “much more of a strategic play related to network building and increased visibility.”