Influencer marketing platform Affable nabs $1m in seed funding

The proceeds will be used to fuel its expansion plans.

Singapore-based influencer marketing platform Affable has raised $1m (US$747,000) in a seed funding round involving the participation of Decacorn Capital and SGInnovate.

Founded in October 2017 as a SaaS platform for influencer marketing, Affable connects brands and marketing agencies with micro-influencers that can add further value to their campaign. It provides tools for brands and agencies for influencer discovery, campaign management, content vetting and ROI measurement using state-of-the-art machine learning technologies. 

"Affable is building a self-service platform where a marketer will be able to find, engage and measure any influencer they work with globally. We provide this as a subscription platform to customers who find influencers on our platform using search parameters relevant to the audience they want to reach," Nisarg Shah, CEO and co-founder of Affable told Singapore Business Review. 

Affable enables customrs to view detailed demographics and psychographic insights about the influencer's followers and information about competing brands that the influencer might have worked with in the past. The platform can also analyse the performance of the influencer posts and if they are property reaching the target audience.

"We launched early in order to avoid developing feature that customers do not want. This resulted in the customers always demanding more features which was a good problem to have," added Shah.

The startup was incubated by Entrepreneur First who in turn pitched in for the startup's latest funding round along with BANSEA and a host of other angel investors including senior executives from Microsoft and Google. Affable's funding round also marked the first participation of SGInnovate in funding promising firms through its StartupSG Equity Scheme. 

Affable plans to use the proceeds from the funding to support product development by hiring engineers to scale their technology and fuel their expansion plans into key markets across Southeast Asia over the next 18 months.

"Today, there exists Google AdWords for search ads and Facebook Ad Network for sponsored ads. Five years from now, Affable wants to be the one-stop platform for word-of-mouth marketing through influencers, for any company size, anywhere in the world."