The Singapore-born startup’s latest funding round was participated by a host of venture capital, individuals and angel investors
India, 5 May 2021 – Few¢ents, the Singapore based FinTech-for-Media startup that provides solutions for digital publishers and creators to transform ways to monetize their content, announced that it has successfully raised US$1.6 million in seed funding. These funds will be primarily used to enhance the company’s proprietary pay-per-content solution and expand its business footprint globally.
This round saw participation from venture capital funds M Venture Partners & Hustle Fund, in addition to angel investors such as Koh Boon Hwee (former Chairman of DBS Bank), Kenneth Bishop (former Managing Director, Southeast Asia, Facebook), Jeremy Butteriss (Partnerships, Stripe), Shiv Choudhury (Partner and Managing Director, the Boston Consulting Group), Francesco Alberti (former APAC Regional Sales Director, Bloomberg Media Distribution), Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (President, Summit Media), Prantik Mazumdar (Managing Director, Dentsu), Saurabh Mittal (Chairman and Founder, Mission Holdings) and Nitesh Kripalani (former Director and Country Head, Amazon Video India).
Few¢ents founders Abhishek Dadoo and Dushyant Khare bring extensive leadership experience in adtech and digital publishing. Abhishek is a second-time entrepreneur having previously co-founded online-to-offline attribution platform Shoffr, which was acquired by Affle that subsequently went public in 2019. He previously served in senior roles in firms such as DHL, Ericsson and PwC.
Dushyant led partnerships for Google with the region’s largest publishers for 13 years, in addition to having worked with companies like SAP Ariba and American Express. Pooling together their joint wealth of expertise, they have created a platform that focuses on making quality content easily monetizable so that digital publishers can focus their efforts on bringing premium content to users.
“In recent times, users are willing to pay for quality content more than ever. However, users won’t subscribe everywhere and hence willingness to commit to monthly subscriptions hovers between 1% – 5% of active users for any single publisher. Quality content is getting more and more fragmented and hence users seek a simpler way to micro-pay across publishers, especially in their local currency,” said Abhishek Dadoo, Co-founder and CEO, Few¢ents.
Through its solution, Few¢ents helps digital publishers unbundle and monetize premium content, including articles, video and podcasts, via a pay-per-content service that sits on the publishers’ sites. It accepts 50 currencies from around the world, allowing publishers to monetize their global audience reach. Rich data insights also help publishers optimize price and invest in stories that resonate most with their audience.
“Few¢ents provides incremental revenue to publishers. Our pay-per-content solution gives them a complementary monetization avenue, in addition to advertisements and subscriptions. Ultimately, this helps publishers refocus efforts on producing high quality content, move away from a culture of just maximising page views and supporting the media and creator industry at large,” stated Dushyant Khare, Co-founder and CCO, Few¢ents.
“Few¢ents offers an exciting promise of transforming revenue generation for the digital media industry globally. It provides users the ability to micro-pay for valuable content while giving publishers a much needed incremental revenue stream. All this is backed by strong technology combining FinTech and MediaTech with machine learning based analytics,” said Joachim Ackermann, Director and Operating Partner at M Venture Partners.
Currently, Few¢ents is working with a variety of publishers and media platforms across Asia and Europe, including India’s leading vernacular dailies Sakal and Dainik Jagran – that have a readership of over 10 million and 55 million respectively – Indonesian technology news platform DailySocial, and digital publishing solutions provider Quintype. The company has also integrated with the global video streaming solution Dailymotion, and entered a business development partnership with media consultancy Jnomics Media to expand into European markets.
