DailySocial picks up an investor

Daily Social, Indonesia’s most prominent blog about startups, announced yesterday a significant investment by MerahPutih Inc., a brand new incubator led by Antonny Liem and Herman Kwok, both of whom are directors at Klix Digital. Daily Social’s founder, Rama Mamuaya, made the announcement on the site’s second anniversary.

A short while ago Rama announced that he was leaving his job at digital agency Bubu.com to focus on DailySocial as the blog has, in his words, “reached a critical mass” in terms of coverage and significance among the country’s startup community. This means it  requires more of his attention that it has in the past.

As the leading source of news on Indonesian startups, Rama claimed that DailySocial itself is a startup. It’s something that he’s put a lot of time, effort, and money on over the last two years and it’s at a point where outside funding and assistance would be required to take the blog to the next step.

The announcement was made at the SparxUp gathering which featured TechCrunch senior editor Sarah Lacy who’s in town for the second time this year. Lacy is on a whirlwind tour of Singapore and Indonesia (see her posts on Eduardo Saverin in Singapore, the republic’s utopia problem, and interview with Neoteny Lab’s James Chan)

Klix Digital is an award-winning marketing communications agency closely tied to Kaskus Networks, Indonesia’s largest online community. Its founders and directors are some of the most successful and respected entrepreneurs in the digital arena, which puts them at the right position to recognize and push ahead with opportunities in this particular space.

Rama also made a point that with MerahPutih as an investor, DailySocial remains his domain and it maintains its editorial independence. At the moment DailySocial is MerahPutih’s sole investment but they do plan to add more to their portfolio once the company is properly set up.

In a phone interview with e27, Rama admitted that currently there’s no revenue model yet but the site already has a few advertisers and he’s planning on running a series of events related to local startups. SparxUp, an awards show for Indonesian startups, which is coming up this Friday and Saturday, is one such event.

e27 is a media partner of SparxUp and we’ll be on hand to report the latest stories from the two day event.

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