Anchanto, an e-commerce logistics and online selling platform based in Singapore, said on Monday that it has secured an undisclosed seed funding round from beauty products distributor Luxasia Group and e-commerce enabler Transcosmos Inc. Japan (TCI).
These are two of the largest players in the Asian e-commerce domain and their combined funding amount is understood to be in the millions, in addition to offering their overall partner services across its networks.
Luxasia is an existing client of Anchanto, and since its partnership with the startup, it has been able to grow its e-commerce presence to be working with more than 3,000 retail outlets to distribute its products.
Meanwhile, TCI has renewed its partnership with Anchanto in order to allow its clients to expand their presence in the Asia Pacific markets.
“Anchanto has built a strong sense end-to-end Asian e-commerce offering over the last five years in the region by providing e-commerce market entry gateway services. Both companies, Luxasia and TCI are Anchanto software users and I am indeed elated to receive investment from them,” said Vaibhav Dabhade, the CEO and Founder of Anchanto.
He further added, “this investment is crucial in our ambition to reinforce our leadership in markets we are presently in and also venture in other countries by growing our team and further develop our products’ capabilities.”
The startup’s flagship product, SelluSeller enables companies to manage listings, common inventory, order management, and payments across different marketplaces worldwide.
“We are in the business of providing enterprise SaaS products to empower e-commerce logistics and online selling and taking them to the next level. We help brands and sellers to sell across channels and metamorphose traditional into e-commerce logistics players,” explained Dabhade.
The company’s first customer for their cross-border fulfilment service was Lazada. Since their inception, their list of customers has expanded to include big names like 3M, L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline New York, La Roche-Posay, ASOS, New Look, and WNDirect.
“In our next stage of growth, we aim to gain market share in Southeast Asia by offering a one-stop solution to address the fragmented market,” said Dabhade.
However expanding in Asia has been complex, especially in the diverse emerging markets has required the startups to tailor individual solutions for each market.
“We learned that every one of these markets is unique, and the only way to win is to localise products for each one of them. For instance, sellers and distributors in Indonesia, require a completely different set of pricing and functionalities as compared to Singapore,” said Dabhade.
“We are rapidly adopting our products, pricing, and support to each market as if we are building a new software for each market from scratch. For example, Anchanto platforms in Korea are focused only for cross-border e-commerce into Southeast Asia, whereas in India it is focused more on local and cross-border fulfilment,” he added
Founded in Singapore in 2011 with only three employees, Anchanto’s total revenue in 2015 is S$2 million. Since working with IE Singapore, the company has scaled up exponentially, reaching triple digit growth and expanding its staff strength to 50 across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and India.
To further speed up its growth, Anchanto said it is targeting Southeast Asia to ride the online retail trend and the region’s huge population of over 600 million people.
Anchanto said that the latest capital will be used to rapidly expand across the Asia-Pacific, and grow its operations in Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India.
The startup also added that it plans to help retailers in the region to take their businesses from brick and mortar to the online world of ecommerce, as well as for traditional logistics players to transform their businesses and start catering to online sellers.
