Postr announces significant growth with major telecom partners Telkomsel, Telefonica + Altice

Wellington’s four year old ad-tech start-up Postr has experienced rapid global growth through partnerships with three top international telecoms, a doubling of its staff to 25 and a quadrupling of monthly revenue over the past 6 months.

Postr’s white label apps, which allow content generators and advertisers to connect with consumers on their smartphone lock screens and lets telecoms unlock free data for their customers, is proving a winner as the company approaches a NZ$2million annual recurring revenue run-rate this quarter.

Its founder and CEO, former advertising creative Milan Reinartz (pictured), who recently made the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list, is proud of his company’s significant global growth over a short period of time, bridging two industries that are hard to crack – telecoms and digital advertising.

The company was runner-up for Deloitte’s Rising Star award in 2016 and this year Reinartz was also on the list of Digerati APAC list of The Drum.  

Says Reinartz: “Even though Postr is expanding globally, New Zealand offers a great environment for start-ups and we intend to keep our holding structure, headquarters and our core team in research and development based here. The government support around R&D tax credits as well as R&D grants totaling NZ$357,000 from Callaghan Innovation has been very helpful for us.”

With offices now in Wellington, Auckland, Singapore and Vietnam and representative offices in Indonesia, Portugal and Germany, the company’s footprint is going global but its outlook is focused.

Reinartz says the secret to Postr’s rapid recent success has been a steep learning curve and a focus on creating operational excellence across remote teams.

Says Reinartz: “Getting an enterprise deal done is one thing; turning it into a massive success is another. We are starting to figure out a playbook that really works – how to structure the organization across markets and business units and how to best work with local partners in dispersed and culturally differentiated markets. We have also simplified and streamlined our tech to make use of the economies of scale across multiple fast growing apps.”

And this success is reflected in the numbers. Postr has seen over 2 million installs worldwide, allowing it to serve close to 500 million ads this year. Also, perhaps even more exciting, the company has already given more than 500 Terabytes of mobile connectivity to consumers this year.

Postr has launched with three international telecoms over the past year – the biggest players in their markets; Telkomsel in Indonesia is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world with 160 million subscribers; Telefonica (O2) in Germany and Altice in Portugal.

The company is launching more apps with leading mobile network operators in Singapore, Chile, South Africa, Algeria and Jordan. To boost its growth, Postr will also launch similar B2C apps in developed markets including the United States and Canada in the near future.

Back in New Zealand, the Postr bench is strong with ten staff in Wellington and two in Auckland. Reinartz says the local market remains a priority and he has hopes for new growth at home with its original telco app SkinnyCollect, following the significant recent marketing campaign of Skinny Mobile.

Says Reinartz: “While the scale is offshore, we have continued conversations with the Kiwi telecom operators to launch new innovative products. Early talks with one New Zealand carrier about big data monetisation have been particularly exciting.

“The New Zealand market was a great test run for our global expansion – it’s the perfect spot to see how a developed market reacts to a product and this has allowed us to scale across the world. We would love to repeat this process with new products we will be launching over the coming year.”

Investment has been another key to the company’s international trajectory, with NZ$5.7million raised from NZ investors including NZVIF (The New Zealand Venture Investment Fund), K1W1 (Sir Stephen Tindall’s family office VC), super-Angel James Sweetbaum, Angel HQ and ICE Angels, and international players including Koh Boon Hwee, a well-known Singaporean Angel investor who is also a board member of GIC (Singapore’s US$359 billion Sovereign Wealth Fund), MDI Ventures (corporate venture capital arm of Southeast Asian telecom giant Telkom Indonesia), Gunung Sewu Group (prominent Indonesia-based family office) and others.

And with significant growth opportunities ahead, Reinartz says Postr will continually be looking for strategic partners and investors to help achieve its full potential for global domain leadership.

Says Reinartz: “It’s always been important for us to find the right investors and to build a board that has an understanding of the telecommunications and advertising industries – people who are in a position to provide the right governance to help our exec team achieve our goals in 2018 and beyond.”

Alongside the line-up of high profile investors, Postr has an enviable line-up of Board members, such as chairman David Akers, who was a director of GreenButton up until their successful exit and purchase by Microsoft in 2014. Other board members include Singaporean based Chon-Phung Lim, who held VP and SVP titles at Hewlett-Packard and Oracle Corporation respectively, and Mun-Kein Chang, current VP Product Management at global roaming business Syniverse.

View Postr’s website here.