TotallyAwesome bags US$10m funding, hunts for marketing lead

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TotallyAwesome has raised US$10 million in seed funding (debt and equity combined) from San Francisco-based Partners For Growth and Singapore-based boutique investment growth advisory firm Yefira Group specialising in adtech investment consulting.

Having quadrupled its revenue and increased its headcount by 200% over the last three financial years, TotallyAwesome will use the funding to solidify its position in a space where it has first-mover advantage, while expanding its footprint across key strategic markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and Australia.

CEO Will Anstee (pictured right) told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the funds will also be deployed against its kid and teen safe tech as well as bringing onboard top quality talent. While he was unable to share details about TotallyAwesome's marketing plans at the moment, Anstee said there is a lot going on in the pipeline and it is currently on the hunt for a new head of marketing and head of culture, as well as developers and data scientists.

Last year, the company brought on board Jean-Michel Wu as its head of talent. He was previously APAC CEO of Grace Blue Partnership. It also named Ridwan S Hidayat its Indonesia country manager last year to beef up its operations in the country. He was previously with Essence as client services director and planning director. TotallyAwesome aims to enable a youth-safe digital ecosystem by curating media inventory for brands to engage with more than 500 million monthly active under-18 users across Asia Pacific, safely.

"The importance of cultural fit was at the top of my list when looking for both equity and debt partners. To this end, both PFG and the Yefira Group are a perfect match. Exciting times ahead," Anstee said. He joined the team two years ago and was previously Asia Pacific president at Initiative.

This investment comes a few months after it launched the TotallyAwesome Programmatic Playground, which is touted as a world-first digital platform that allows APAC advertisers to engage with children under 18 in brand safe and age-appropriate environments while using programmatic technology.

Quoting 2018 statistics from UNICEF, TotallyAwesome said that every day, 175,000 kids come online for the first time and by the age of 13, each one will have 72 million data points associated with them. At a time when there’s never been more scrutiny over online data privacy, Internet usage by under-18s now accounts for 40% of daily traffic. This major structural shift has propelled the need for a proprietary and contextual data-graph that the advertising industry can rely on, and TotallyAwesome believes it is uniquely positioned to reinvent the engagement relationship with younger audiences (under 18s) at scale.

Karthi Sepulohniamm (pictured second from right), MD of Partners For Growth and head of Asia Pacific and Australia, added: “We are excited to have the opportunity to support TotallyAwesome’s growth today and over the coming years, as it delivers solutions to global brands to provide a safe environment for kids to interact with technology. We're excited to help TotallyAwesome scale their platform which curates safe digital worlds for young explorers. We look forward to welcoming TotallyAwesome into our portfolio."

George Kypraios (pictured left), CEO, Yefira Group said: " We are very proud to partner TotallyAwesome at this critical juncture by arranging the venture debt facility with Partners for Growth, as well as investing our own capital as an equity investment. TotallyAwesome is exactly the type of client we want to be associated with, one that is pushing innovation in the right direction within the adtech /martech industry but most importantly with purpose at its heart. This is just the beginning. Watch this space.”

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