Jakarta, April 20, 2022 – Indonesia’s leading local audio content startup, NOICE, raises $22 million in Series A funding round led by Northstar, with participation from existing investors Alpha JWC, Go-Ventures, and Kinesys. This new investment will support NOICE’s ambition to become Indonesia’s largest audio platform, by accelerating NOICE’s content acquisition and advancing NOICE’s technology for users and creators.
NOICE fills a huge gap in Indonesia’s local digital audio content supply which remains dominated by music. NOICE serves over two million users, having grown more than 4x over the past year, with its daily listener spending ~80 minutes per day on the platform. NOICE focuses on producing and curating local audio content across different audio verticals and hosts more than 40,000 pieces of content. NOICE is working closely with Indonesia’s local writers’ community to launch original audio drama series.
“This investment marks another milestone for NOICE to unlock the broader opportunities in disrupting Indonesia’s audio content industry. We will use the fund to grow our audio content creators’ community, advance the tech platform, and double down our efforts in developing audio series where we aim to surface Indonesia’s best stories from the local writers/storyteller’s community and adapt them into an audio format. We’ve piloted this new format and found very promising engagement and retention results. This is truly an interesting space to explore and has a lot of potentials.” said Rado Ardian, CEO of NOICE.
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Growing users & nurturing creators
As announced earlier this year, NOICE continues to expand and increases its podcast content selections by partnering with prominent figures and influencers such as Raffi Ahmad, Arief Muhammad, Jerome Polin, Vincent, Desta, and Andre Taulany. These prominent artists have aggregated more than 130 million followers & subscribers on their social media platforms. Their presence on NOICE inspires other creators to experiment with various audio content formats and to publish their content on NOICE’s platform. To encourage even more creators to build audio content, NOICE has also launched an end-to-end creator development program to guide the creators throughout their creative journey and a proprietary audio creation SaaS platform that allows creators to build and publish content directly on NOICE.
“Users and creators are always our top priority. For users, we want them to have NOICE as their daily companion app through various content lineups ranging from new aspiring creators, and hyperlocal talents up to mega influencers. While on the creators’ side, we want to invest in building Noicemaker Studio, our recently launched a creator-focused platform where creators can grow their show and unlock the potential creator-driven monetization.” Rado continued.
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“Our commitment remains the same to grow and nurture the audio-first content creator ecosystem in Indonesia. We’re launching Noicemaker Club Program (NCP), an integrated program to support and nurture new & emerging audio creators to grow on NOICE. The support will include a range of education materials and workshops, content production support, promotion, and monetization. In order for any creators to be a part of our ecosystem, we have just launched Noicemaker Studio which is a tool for creators to distribute their audio content on NOICE with just one click away and immediately let them have access to their own content performance metrics dashboard. With this tool, we are now able to support any aspiring creators out there to start creating content and grow their audience on NOICE.” said Niken Sasmaya, CBO of Noice.
“Digital audio content is one of the fastest-growing media categories with more than a billion listeners globally. We have been working closely with NOICE since 2019 and are pleased to see the business scaling rapidly. Under Rado and Niken’s leadership and supported by the strong network of Mahaka Radio, NOICE has grown to be a socially impactful technology platform empowering many Indonesian artists, storytellers, and talk show hosts to create content and find audiences in Indonesia and beyond. We have seen NOICE’s plans to aggressively scale and we are excited to partner with them on this journey.” said Patrick Walujo, Co-founder & Managing Partner of Northstar Group.
