Taiwan's Next Entertainment, developer of the app MeMe that lets people interact with nearby live streamers, raises $25M Series A to expand internationally
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Next Entertainment's $25M Series A lands at the front end of the Asia-Pacific livestreaming funding wave that the related coverage traces forward: within two years, Bigo raised a $272M Series D led by YY and Tencent put $461.6M into Huya alongside $630M into Douyu, resetting what 'well-funded' means in the category.
Against that backdrop, MeMe's differentiator — interaction with live streamers physically nearby — is a location-based wedge that bigger platforms built on broadcast-scale streaming don't have, and the round exists to test whether that wedge travels outside Taiwan.
First-order effects
- Next Entertainment now has the capital to push MeMe beyond its home market, betting that proximity-based streaming works across cultures rather than only in dense Taiwanese cities.
Second-order effects
- MeMe will compete internationally against rivals with ten times its war chest — Bigo's $272M round and Tencent's backing of Huya and Douyu mean the contest is decided by burn rate and creator supply, forcing Next Entertainment to win on its location mechanic rather than spend.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern in the coverage holds, livestreaming consolidates around a handful of giant-capital platforms backed by Chinese strategic investors, leaving regional players like Next Entertainment to either carve durable local-network-effect niches or become acquisition targets — the path China's Meitu took when it bought into Dreamscape Horizon to fuel its own international push.
The trend: Asia-Pacific livestreaming apps are racing into international markets on venture capital, with round sizes escalating so fast that early movers like Next Entertainment must differentiate on product mechanics before scale economics close the window.