Bridestory, Indonesian’s leading online wedding marketplace, has just secured Series A funding from Rocket Internet Group.
Jakarta, Indonesia, March 5th 2014 – Bridestory, Indonesian’s leading online wedding marketplace, has just secured Series A funding from Rocket Internet Group.
This investment marks the first investment made by Rocket Internet Group in the online wedding market. This investment round is followed by Bridestory’s previous investors, Sovereigns Capital, East Ventures and Fenox VC and joined by two new investors, Skystar Capital and Lippo Digital Ventures.
This investment is a huge coup for Bridestory, which was launched in April 2014 and has assumed a leading position in the Southeast Asian wedding market.
Rocket Internet Group believe Kevin (a serial entrepreneur) and Emile Etienne are both rare talents and ones to watch in South East Asia. They have the vision and team to build a very large online business addressing the c.$18bn wedding market in South East Asia.
By leveraging the Rocket Internet global platform, present in over 100 countries, there is huge upside potential to take Bridestory into many other countries.
CEO and Founder of Bridestory, Kevin Mintaraga believes that this partnership will take the company to the next level in the international wedding market. “The people behind Rocket are proven entrepreneurs with track records in building successful global businesses.
They are more than just investors. We’re excited about being able to work together with them to scale the business, but we are more excited to learn from their experience and tap into their knowledge as well as leveraging the Rocket Internet platform globally.”
Bridestory plans to use the recently raised funds to accelerate growth, scale the team, step up the product development, and to get ready for expansion into the international wedding market.
ABOUT ROCKET INTERNET
Our Mission
Rocket’s mission is to become the world’s largest Internet platform outside of the United States and China. Rocket identifies and builds proven Internet business models and transfers them to new, underserved or untapped markets where it seeks to scale them into market leading online companies. Rocket is focused on proven online business models that satisfy basic consumer needs across three sectors: eCommerce, marketplaces and financial technology. Rocket was founded in 2007 and now has more than 25,000 employees across its network of companies, which operate in more than 100 countries on five continents.
Our Focus
Our e-commerce companies include retail companies in the areas of fashion, general merchandise, home and living, office supplies and food and groceries. Our marketplace companies seek to displace traditional supply chains by creating venues where buyers and sellers can transact directly, and include real estate and car online classifieds, travel and transport, and food delivery companies. Our third sector, financial technology, includes companies that focus on bringing together borrowers and lenders in regions and segments that are underserved by traditional banks, particularly in the consumer and small and medium-sized enterprise segments, and on facilitating payments.
Our Strategy
As part of our global strategy, we have created regional Internet groups in Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East in order to bundle local market and business model insights, facilitate regional commercial, strategic and investment partnerships, in particular with mobile telecommunication providers, enable local recruiting and sourcing and accelerate the regional rollout of our companies. We have developed proprietary technology where we believe it provides our companies with a competitive advantage. Our proprietary technology is highly flexible and scalable and provides our companies with significant cost and speed advantages, particularly during their initial rapid launch and rollout processes.
Our Platform
Our platform has enabled us to build a large, global network of companies and has historically put us in a position to launch more than 10 new companies every year through application of a standardized business model identification and development process. Every new company that we start accelerates the virtuous circle of synergy creation among our companies. The larger the size of our network of companies, the more significant our opportunity is to benefit from synergies and network effects with respect to our suppliers, solution providers, customers and employees.