Fabulate is putting its newly raised $4.5 million towards hiring senior specialists across its APAC markets and accelerating its AI-powered creator marketing products, as the company looks to level-up its position in the region and attract international markets to its technology.
The influencer marketing and technology platform has told B&T that its latest capital injection will be used to “expedite regional growth strategy”. It currently employs more than 100 staff in 10 markets across APAC, including Australia and New Zealand, though this number is expected to grow.
Fabulate announced this morning that it had closed an oversubscribed $4.5 million capital raise, giving the business a post-money valuation of $84.5 million.
But rather than using the funding to prove out its business model, Fabulate chief product and strategy officer and co-founder Nathan Powell said the business is using the cash to accelerate a strategy that is already working.
“It’s less about proving the business model, which is always an exciting part of any business’ development. It was more about expediting our strategy,” Powell told B&T. “That investment has been earmarked for both people and products.”
Powell said with the money Fabulate is focused on putting senior specialists and experts into individual markets across the region “rather than attempting to manage Southeast Asia as one homogenous market”.
He said this local approach was critical to Fabulate’s expansion, with cultural nuances, relationships and market dynamics differing significantly between countries.
“We’re already a company of 100 people in 10 different APAC markets,” Powell said. “What that presence looks like is different for each individual market. But the one thing that we’ve made sure that we get right with each expansion is we make sure that we have those right people in each market.”
Fabulate currently has its headquarters in Sydney, with offices and a presence spanning Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and Thailand, among its broader APAC footprint.
“A lot of businesses have made the mistake of thinking they can helicopter people in from other regions to run and operate in Southeast Asia,” he said. “But you miss out on all of the local nuance, and that extends beyond language, the cultural nuance, the relationships.”
The second major area of investment will be Fabulate’s technology and AI capabilities, with Powell describing its SparQ platform as the company’s “big bet”.
Fabulate has been developing its AI-powered creator marketing capabilities over the past 18 months, with the technology designed to augment the work of people involved in creator marketing rather than replace them.
“SparQ is our big bet as a business,” Powell said. “This is not AI innovation that is earmarked at replacing people. People are equally important in this process.”
He said Fabulate’s early success had come from using AI to augment the human experience across creator marketing, with the technology increasingly becoming a philosophy underpinning the company’s product development.
“SparQ is less becoming a product and more a philosophy of how we build and innovate in the space moving forward,” Powell said.
The APAC expansion is also being positioned as more than simply a regional growth play.
Other markets watching on
Powell believes Fabulate’s growth in APAC, from using the funds, could eventually become a source of growth for Fabulate in other international markets too.
He said the company is already receiving enquiries from businesses in the US and UK looking to Fabulate for insight into the next wave of creator marketing innovation.
“For us, this raise is all about cementing our position in APAC so that we can build products that can be used globally,” Powell said. “What we’ve found over the journey and the history of the business is that so much of the innovation is actually taking place out of this corridor.”
Powell said creator marketing innovation had increasingly emerged from Southeast Asia and APAC, challenging the traditional assumption that the US is always ahead of other markets when it comes to marketing technology.
“Up until this role, or this category that we’ve been in, my entire career I’ve been told that the United States is 18 months ahead of everyone else,” he said.
“And creator marketing is all of that innovation has been born out of Southeast Asia and APAC, specifically with its proximity to China.”
The company is therefore hoping its APAC expansion will create products and technology that other markets will ultimately want to adopt.
“The way that we see it is that what’s happening in Southeast Asia and this APAC corridor, every other market across the world is watching,” Powell said.
“So, if we can build the products in the way that we know we can and develop them for a market fit that we know exists, we know that other markets will be tapping on our door, just like they already are, to help them to be able to expand their creator marketing more efficiently and effectively.”
Fabulate’s strategy for entering new markets has also largely been driven by partnerships with agencies, platforms and brands, rather than a traditional top-down expansion model.
Powell said that approach would continue as the company grows.
“Every market we’ve ever expanded to has been off the back of partnerships, and that’s been a very deliberate approach in how we’ve done business,” he said.
The funding round was led by existing shareholders, with around 90 per cent of the capital coming from investors already backing the business.
Powell told B&T that the remaining capital came from additional high-net-worth partners of Nightingale Partners and Centerstone Capital.
Fabulate said the round closed without an external fundraising process, with the company already profitable before the raise.
