Singapore – There is so much scope for tech media and this year has proved to be a boon for this sector particularly in Asia. The Singapore based tech blog e27.co has raised $650K funding from the investors in order to diversify and help its users to better connect with Asia’s tech ecosystem. Further, it has also planned to raise funding by the end of the year 2015.
The journey of tech blog, e27.co
Asia based e27 was born in 2007 and has a story behind its name. ‘E’ stands for the entrepreneurs who are the dedicated souls working towards groundbreaking innovations and 27 is the median age to start a start-up for entrepreneurs; thereby getting the name e27. The company has a website providing start-up and tech blog in Asia. Also, the company organises two day events called Echelon and one day event called as Venturecon in order to learn, connect and foster relationships by bringing together various investors and corporate leaders.
The funding was raised from the existing investors and e27 aims at a larger funding round of $3million by the year end. The entire media industry in Asia is going through an interesting phase of evolution and e27.co is trying to learn what works best for their ecosystem. Earlier in 2013, e27 had raised $615,000 funds from various Venture Capital (VC) firms of the Asia including Ardent Capital, 8capita Partners, Pinehurst Advisors and B Dash Ventures.
One of the rival companies, Tech In Asia has also raised funding of $4 million for developing its site into community hub. The funds were utilised in shifting from straight-up tech blog to a website which includes user-generated content (UGC) and materials on its homepage. However, due to which the quality of the content has degraded as the users were not able to provide the same quality as journals used to provide.
This failure on Tech In Asia’s end has indeed opened the doors for e27, the tech blog website to capitalise the opportunity and invest at the right time so that it can easily differentiate from Tech In Asia. And, this differentiation could also lead to an increase in the circulation numbers.
Other than Tech In Asia, there are several other competitors in Asia’s tech blog including TechCrunch, Digital News Asia and Deal Street Asia. Last year, Digital News Asia has also raised $300,000 for capturing the tech news market. Also, Deal Street Asia has made an investment for the growth of its reporting team in order to cover the stories beyond tech also.