Shopmatic gets $5.7 million funding from ACP Pte, Spring Seeds Capital
E-commerce tech provider Shopmatic enables online retail for small-time traders by creating a digital store, providing payment gateways and logistics solutions
Bengaluru: E-commerce enabler Shopmatic Pte Ltd has raised $5.7 million (about Rs37 crore) in a fresh funding round led by technology-focused venture capital firm ACP Pte Ltd, with participation from Singapore-based fund Spring Seeds Capital Pte Ltd, a senior company executive said on Tuesday.
Sameer Narula, managing partner at ACP, will join Shopmatic’s board.
Shopmatic, founded by former PayPal executives Anurag Avula, Yen Ti Lim and Kris Chen in 2015, had raised $1.5 million from a clutch of undisclosed angel investors in the first half of 2015.
The company enables small and medium businesses as well as individual sellers to trade their products online by creating a digital store, providing payment gateway and logistics solutions among others. The company’s solutions help merchants not only operate their own web stores but also sell on other online marketplaces as well as social media platforms such as Facebook.
Shopmatic has a sharp focus on enabling individuals to sell online.
“We support small and medium enterprises as well as individual entrepreneurs. We are very keen on building the individual; entrepreneur space, for instance homemakers or students. Where we have been successful is that we have broken that barrier. About 95% of our customers have their own creation. We don’t have resellers or sellers of commoditised products like a mobile phone,” Avula, chief executive at Shopmatic, said in an interview.
The company says it has amassed a user base of about 75,000 merchants, while adding about 700-800 merchants every day.
“A marketplace is not your own store, so the whole identity creation is one piece. It lends a lot of credibility to a seller who has own stores. We are not saying it’s either this channel or that. What we say is while you build your own store, leverage the multiple channels we provide, be it marketplaces or social media. The cost of transaction on your own platform is much cheaper than in a marketplace, while also creating your own brand,” Avula added.
This apart, Shopmatic, which charges $20 a month for its services, offers business consultancy to its customers against an additional fee. The company’s executives in Bangalore and Gurgaon advise the merchants on ways to maximize their business, apart from roping in external digital marketing agencies to advise the merchants.
The Singapore-based company, which currently operates in India, Singapore and Hong Kong, wants to grow its user base by two to four times in the next 12 months, as well as expand to south Asian countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia among others, apart from the Middle East.
The company currently generates about three-fourths of its business from India.
Shopmatic competes with Shopify, as well as the likes of Zepo and Kartrocket in India.
Zepo raised an undisclosed amount from angel investor Anupam Mittal and One97 Mobility fund, while KartRocket has raised about $10 million from Bertelsmann India Investments, 500 Startups, Neervana Venture Advisors and BEENEXT among others.
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Business NewsCompaniesStart-upsShopmatic gets $5.7 million funding from ACP Pte, Spring Seeds Capital
First Published:13 Jun 2017, 09:59 PM IST
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