SweetEscape, an on-demand photography service, is ready to execute some plans after receiving seed funding of US$1 million (approx. IDR 14 billion) led by East Ventures. Some other investors are Beenext, SkyStar Capital, and GDP Venture.
The money will be used for Asia’s market expansion. After the Philippines, SweetEscape might expand to Thailand and South Korea in the near future. The company is ready to hire a local team and work together with local brands to expand SweetEscape.
Local teams in each country are responsible to provide relevant recommendation and suggestion for its clients. They’re also expected to educate SweetEscape’s new markets about its features.
The funding was finalized last year, but being recently announced by SweetEscape. In fact, the announcement came after SweetEscape’s expansion to enter Philippines market.
David Soong, SweetEscape’s CEO, about this issue, said, “This announcement is a decision of SweetEscape’s internal team and other related investors. Moreover, we saw the Philippines and Asian market are growing and intriguing for more development.”
“Our goal is to become a global company. When it started, SweetEscape only had clients from Indonesia. As of now, 45% of our clients are overseas, mostly coming from Asia and the US. Basically, professional photographers are the global market’s need.”
Soong continued, other than expansion, SweetEscape will use the fund to develop new technology for its clients. The company is preparing for a system that can edit photos automatically in high resolution within less than 24 hours.
“As our goal to provide the best for clients, we’ll certainly keep developing in terms of technology.”
Emile Etienne, SweetEscapes’ Founder and COO, added, to maintain the good quality photo shooting and editing quickly is a challenge for the company. Therefore, the right technology is going to be a solution, not only for clients but also for photographers.
“Our team has built the easiest booking app for photography and will continue to invest in IT for the seamless experience to our clients and photographers,” he said.
Founded two years ago, SweetEscape claims to have 2000 photographers distributed in 100 countries. SweetEscape’s clients is said to reach over thousands of people worldwide.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian
