SPUN, the Indonesian visa startup, runs its application flow inside the checkouts of Klook, Traveloka, Tiket and Nusatrip, and reports a 99% approval rate on the visa applications it files. The company was founded by Christa Sabathaly, its chief executive, and Dilla Anindita, two former colleagues from LINE Indonesia.
In January the company closed a USD 1.8 million seed funding round led by Genesia Ventures, as TNGlobal reported the round. The money is for expanding the product across Southeast Asia.
How it started
Sabathaly and Anindita met at LINE Indonesia. Before that, Sabathaly worked at Google, and Anindita was a product lead at Grab and Cookpad. All three are consumer products where a slow form is a lost user, and that is the background the two brought to visas.
The visa is the one step of a trip that stayed manual. A traveller in Southeast Asia can book a flight, a hotel and an airport transfer in one session on an OTA. The visa still meant a separate form, a separate agent and a separate wait, with rules that change by passport, destination and purpose. Agung Hadinegoro, Partner at Antler Indonesia, put the size of it in one line: “visa friction is not an Indonesia-only problem”.
How OTA visa integration works
SPUN supports more than 300 visa types across more than 90 countries. Its visa flow is embedded in Klook, Traveloka, Tiket and Nusatrip, so the traveller stays inside the OTA’s own checkout and SPUN handles the application behind the page. The OTA offers the visa. SPUN does the work.
The company calls the product AI-enabled visa infrastructure. Takahiro Suzuki, General Partner at Genesia Ventures, said SPUN “is building the intelligence and workflow layer that helps standardize visa processes across Southeast Asia”. The word that matters is layer. SPUN is not a visa agency with a website. It is the workflow underneath other companies’ websites.
The business
SPUN reports a 99% visa application approval rate and more than 200 corporate customers, alongside the four OTA integrations. That gives it two channels: travellers who buy a visa at an OTA checkout, and companies that send staff across borders and want every application handled the same way.
Genesia Ventures led the seed round. Antler, Spiral Ventures, Iterative and Kopital Ventures joined, with Kum Hong Siew, the former Managing Director of Airbnb China, as an angel investor. Sabathaly said the company is “creating infrastructure that can scale regionally while delivering reliability for both individual travelers and travel partners”. Partners is the word for the OTAs and the corporates. SPUN’s customer is as often a platform as a person.
The next twelve months
The seed round is for taking the product across Southeast Asia, and the investor quotes point the same way: Suzuki on standardising visa processes across the region, Hadinegoro on a problem that is not Indonesia-only. The measures to watch are the OTA list beyond the four names and the corporate count beyond 200.
The nearer date is WiT Singapore. SPUN received the AirAsia MOVE award in the 2026 Global Startup Pitch, a return flight from anywhere in Asia to WiT Singapore, which puts the founders in the same room as the region’s OTAs, airlines and investors.
Who to watch. Organisers building panels on distribution in Southeast Asia have a candidate here: two founders from LINE, Google, Grab and Cookpad whose product sits inside four OTA checkouts and more than 200 corporate accounts. Founders who sell infrastructure to the platforms, rather than compete with them, bring a different conversation to a stage than another OTA keynote.
Key takeaway
SPUN shows that an OTA does not have to build the visa step to own it. Rent the layer, keep the customer inside your checkout, and let a specialist carry the rules for 300 visa types across 90 countries. Founders can copy the shape of the deal: pick the one manual step left in a booking flow, build the workflow underneath it, and sell it to the platforms rather than against them. We will be watching the OTA list and the corporate count over the next year.
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