Why SEA deserves its own KOS rails
The creator-commerce stack in Southeast Asia is bolted together from tools built somewhere else. We think the region deserves better.
Every brand we talk to in Singapore is running creator campaigns. Almost none of them are happy with their tooling.
The pattern is the same: a discovery tool from one vendor, briefs in a Google Doc, contracts on PandaDoc, payments through a bank transfer two months late, attribution in a spreadsheet that never quite reconciles. The work gets done, but it gets done expensively.
What's missing
The big creator platforms — the ones brands eventually try — were built for a different shape of market. They optimise for paid social against a handful of mid-tier influencers in the US or UK. SEA looks nothing like that:
- Nano and micro creators do most of the work. A campaign that pays out to forty creators with 5–20k followers each performs better than one paid influencer with 200k.
- TikTok Shop, Shopee Live, and Lazada are the commerce layer. The platform that books the campaign isn't separate from the one that closes the sale.
- Payouts are local-currency, low-ticket, frequent. SGD 80 to a creator three days after a stream goes live. Not USD 5,000 thirty days after a contract closes.
What we're building
Leva is the back-office for this reality. Discovery, briefs, contracts, escrow, attribution, payouts — all in one place, priced like infrastructure (free to brief, 10% when a deal closes) rather than like a SaaS seat.
We'll write more about each of these as they ship. If you're running campaigns in SEA today and any of this resonates, come talk to us.