Indonesian digital media startup Asumsi.co announced today that it has bagged an undisclosed amount of seed funding from VC firm East Ventures. It plans to use the investment to accelerate its technology product development and expand its operations beyond content creation.
The company’s CEO, Pangeran Siahaan, said the key to a sustainable media business is to combine high-quality content and technology innovation.
“We have done our best in creating quality contents that adhere to journalistic values to offer an alternative outside the mainstream media,” he said in the statement. “However, we realize that producing better content only solves a part of the problem.”
Asumsi.co plans to hire more engineers with the fresh funding and build software for monitoring and analysis, to better understand and grow their audience. Siahaan also told KrASIA that Asumsi is building a news aggregator and further developing Yourmedia, a platform for audience participation.
“Soon we’ll open our platform for external use and will partner with several independent digital media. We want to help other alternative media in monetizing their contents,” he added.
Founded in 2017 by Siahaan, a journalist and former TV presenter for sports channel beIN Sports, Asumsi mainly targets young Indonesians with a focus on current affairs and pop culture. The company provides multi-platform content such as articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, and a newsletter, which have amassed more than 10 million viewers per month, according to the firm.