Kurio is in the spotlight these past few days. After successfully sealing a series A funding from Cyber Agent Ventures and a number of angel investors (29/9), the startup announced that they have attracted one of most prominent profiles in Indonesia’s digital industry, Satya Witoelar, to join their team.
We know Satya Witoelar as the co-founder of Koprol. Before developing the social network platform, this Parahyangan University alum had made his fortune as project architect, chief designer, and web designer at a number of companies, before finally joined SkyEight Indonesia in 2009. This is where he started his Koprol and kept developing it until its popularity reached Yahoo!, which resulted on an acquisition by the U.S.-based giant since then.
Although the collaboration didn’t last long, Witoelar was responsible for a number of Yahoo!’s products, including Yahoo! Mail and Messenger, as well as acted as a lead designer for the apps, both in Android and iOS version. The Stamp gamification feature was also rooted from his very own ideas.
At Kurio, Witoelar holds a fundamental role as the Vice President (VP) of Products. “We crave for the best talents to work at Kurio, since to produce the best products is indeed our vision from the beginning,” David Wayne Ika, Kurio Founder, told DailySocial.
According to Ika, it didn’t take too long to lure Witoelar to join his team. It was all started from a recommendation. After a brief process of interview, Ika felt that Witoelar is just the person he really needs, and, luckily, Witoelar was also assured by Ika’s vision. Witoelar himself admitted that he has a passion in reading news contents and installed a number of news apps on his own mobile.
“We asked him, which category would you like to get involved in should you build your own startup? And he said that it’s news,” Ika said. This is in line with Witoelar’s statement, “I was attracted to David’s vision to build Kurio which may engage users while fulfilling their need of information. I myself love to read news via my own mobile”.
Kurio would like to look forward to make use of Witoelar’s skills and experience to take the startup even higher. Ika added that there are a number of points at Kurio, including product development, market size, and consumers, which are waiting for Witoelar’s touch. “Satya will help Kurio a lot, considering that he has tons of experience with Koprol and Yahoo. He is also a well-known figure and possesses a prominent access to group of best talents. Currently, we [Kurio] don’t have any senior software engineer at all,” Ika stated.
