Digital Media Nusantara, the owner and operator of The ASEAN Post, Spotlight Labs and Reimagining Southeast Asia, announced today that it has secured venture financing from Malaysia Debt Ventures (MDV), a wholly owned subsidiary of Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance, to futureproof the business and develop its financial markets technology.
The funding will be used to accelerate Digital Media Nusantara’s mission to become Southeast Asia's first fintech media firm - operating at the forefront of financial markets infrastructure and the market intelligence value chain.
The Pre-series A 'technology bridger' will enable the firm to commence future proofing and digital transformation across its ecosystem of brands, including The ASEAN Post, Reimagining Southeast Asia, and Spotlights Labs.
In addition, the firm will incubate new brands into its stable as well as develop its much awaited, unique ASEAN-focused financial markets infrastructure platform, Discovery Technologies – an advanced machine learning and AI enabled capital markets monitoring and analysis tool.
This will establish Digital Media Nusantara as Southeast East Asia’s first fintech media firm, whilst unlocking new and sustainable revenue streams for the business.
The Leaders
The Digital Media Nusantara team is led by an experienced board of business leaders and industry veterans, including: World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Founder and Managing Director of Digital Media Nusantara, Rohan Ramakrishnan; veteran corporate leader, Azizi Meor Ngah - Co-Founder and Chairman, Strategic Advisory Board; venture capitalist, ST Chua – Venture Financing and Strategy; PE/IB advisory expert, Paul Zaman – Financial Markets Technology; PE/VC specialist, Khoo Eu Wen – Private Equity and Expansion; Ng Yeen Seen – Public Affairs expert and fellow World Economic Forum Young Global Leader; and Public Relations and Media veteran, Terence Stephen, Founding and Managing Editor of The ASEAN Post.
“Digital Media Nusantara’s mission is to bridge the data and information gap surrounding Southeast Asia’s capital markets. It is widely known and acknowledged across the region’s financial services industry and investor community that the lack of accurate, reliable, and structured data is impairing informed decision making and affecting the region’s competitiveness,” said Rohan Ramakrishnan, Founder and Managing Director of Digital Media Nusantara.
“Our objective from inception has been to solve this anomaly by aggregating data and streamlining it into actionable insights that can drive the region and its businesses forward. Digital Media Nusantara is focused on a solution, and we have an extremely experienced team on board to guide our progress and rise to the challenges that lie ahead. With MDV’s support we are now able to move on to the next stage of our development roadmap in time to play a critical role in the ASEAN Economic Community in 2025,” he added.
Commenting on the raise, Nizam Mohamed Nadzri, CEO of Malaysia Debt Ventures, said: “Digital Media Nusantara’s team has both a brilliant idea and strong track record, and also a real commitment to create an ecosystem that not only solves a problem, but helps to drive forward the ASEAN region in terms of global competitiveness.”
“We are proud to back a Malaysian-owned company that has a first-mover advantage in the race to amalgamate ASEAN's financial markets and information systems landscape and play a pivotal role in accelerating this process. We are delighted to have been able to set things into motion for them and look forward to seeing more growth and success for Digital Media Nusantara," he continued.
The Brands
Development shops in Singapore, India and Europe have been engaged to co-develop the design think and technologies given the complexity of the projects by the first quarter of 2022. Concurrently, Digital Media Nusantara will run additional bridging rounds and its larger Series A round to further fuel the development of its growing stable of brands.
Singapore-headquartered corporate finance advisory boutique, Yefira Group, acted as transaction advisors whilst Malaysia-based corporate and M&A law boutique firm, Peter Ling & Van Geyzel, acted as transaction lawyers.
“Digital Media Nusantara is currently in the midst of deploying the capital raised from MDV to further develop the business. We are looking forward to raising the next funding rounds, which will allow Digital Media Nusantara to amplify its growth, scale up further and build up its stable of brands in support of its mission,” commented Hariz bin Muhammad Junid, VP at Yefira Group.
Digital Media Nusantara is wholly owned by Vantage Point Capital, a special purpose vehicle founded by Rohan Ramakrishnan, together with veteran corporate leader Azizi Meor Ngah and persons-acting-in-concert. Digital Media Nusantara in turn owns, operates, and manages the stable of brands including The ASEAN Post, Spotlight Labs, Reimagining Southeast Asia and Discovery Technologies, the unique ASEAN-focused financial markets’ infrastructure technology that is currently under development. Digital Media Nusantara also has a stable of brands that will be strategically rolled out in phases across 2022.