Singapore-based e-commerce firm Shopmatic announced yesterday (June 13) that it has raised $5.7 million of Series AA funding led by ACP Pte Ltd, a technology-focused VC firm; and SPRING SEEDS Capital Pte Ltd, the investment arm of SPRING Singapore.
Shopmatic will be using the new round of financing to fund its expansion to Indonesia, the Philippines and the Middle East.
Currently, Shopmatic is already present in India, Singapore and Hong Kong.
As part of this round of funding, Sameer Narula, Managing Partner of ACP will also be joining Shopmatic’s Board of Directors.
“We have witnessed tremendous growth in merchants leveraging our platform with monthly growth rates in excess of 40 per cent. Our approach of simplicity with a wide value proposition to our customers has deepened our engagement with sellers and grown the category of online sellers,” said Anurag Avula, CEO of Shopmatic.
“With this round of funds, we aim to expand our service to a wider seller base across more markets in Asia and other emerging markets.”
Choosing India To First Launch Its Business
Founded in December 2014 by three ex-PayPal employees, Shopmatic launched first in India to test and develop its product and business model.
But it’s not a surprising choice though – with over 50 million small businesses in the country, and millions of individual sellers trying to use social media and e-commerce marketplaces to broaden their reach, this market move makes total sense.
According to a recent Google-KPMG report, out of an estimated 51 million small and medium enterprises in India, only 10 million are technology ready.
So this presents a huge opportunity for them.
“While everybody wants to take their business online, they need a lot of handholding to overcome latent barriers,” Avula remarked to The Economic Times.
In fact, last November, it launched a mobile app called Shopmatic Go to enable its sellers to build online sites using their mobile phones in just two minutes.
To date, the app has seen more than 130,000 downloads.
Helping SMEs To Grow Their Business Online
The three-year-old Singapore startup essentially enables small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs to take their business online.
Shopmatic caters to a multitude of merchants, including brick-and-mortar retailers and those selling on online marketplaces. From building a website to listing it on an e-marketplace, promoting it on social channels, and providing useful customer insights, Shopmatic handles everything that merchants and individuals need to grow their business online.
Its platform enables SMEs to build their online stores with integrated payment and shipping functions, and sell their products or services through multiple channels.
Data analytics and insights have also been built into the platform to help sellers be more effective in reaching out to their target audience.
With the help of the dashboard, one can easily monitor the volume of the sales on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and assess business growth.
“By using the deep data-sets generated on its platform, Shopmatic has the potential to enable SMEs and partners to better target their services and products and to accelerate the adoption of e-commerce in these high-growth markets,” said Sameer Narula.
Featured Image Credit: Shopmatic
