Shopmatic founders
Shopmatic, Singapore-based e-commerce solution firm, announces its second acquisition of the year, buying 100 per cent stake of CombineSell, a Singaporean startup that allows merchants to manage their business in several online marketplaces on a single platform.
The acquisition deal saw cash-financing of CombineSell and a share swap, Shopmatic’s co-founder and CEO Anurag Avula confirms. All of CombineSell’s seed investors, including angel investor Koh Boon Hwee, branding and communications firm Louken Group, and startup incubator Spaze Ventures, were bought out with cash.
Meanwhile, CombineSell’s founders Loh June Yong, Amanda Ho, and Gerald Lam were bought out with shares in Shopmatic Holding, the holding company of the operating entities.
Singapore-based Shopmatic seeks to assist individuals and small firms to kickstart an e-commerce business, from setting up a website to managing cross-border transactions and customer engagement across different social media platforms.
Shopmatic further confirms that it is now in talks to raise US$29 million by year-end for its Series B round, after securing up to US$7.5 million funding in April. Its backers include Seeds Capital and investment firm August One.
Also Read: Meet Shopmatic, a B2B startup that enables 50K clients to build their own webstores
Back in March, Shopmatic bought a 50.1 per cent stake in Octopus Retail Management, cloud-based omnichannel management software for brick-and-mortar stores, to add into its omnichannel retail strategy.
Avula said that the acquisition of CombineSell will help fill a gap in Shopmatic’s business management solutions for sellers. Previously, the firm had to work with third-party providers to connect its proprietary dashboard with online marketplaces.
With CombineSell’s software, merchants will be able to publish listings, to answer customer queries, manage customer relationships, and more, all from a single platform.
CombineSell was launched in June 2017 and boasted about 8,000 merchants in Singapore and Malaysia. The software allows for over 30 e-commerce channel integrations, including Lazada, Amazon, Carousell, Redmart and accounting software Xero.
Shopmatic said that it will soon launch in Malaysia to provide working capital loans to merchants with its Malaysia partner, a leading local bank. The partnership will be similar to Shopmatic’s tie-up with the United Overseas Bank (UOB) in Singapore that had integrated Shopmatic’s solutions into its suite of cloud-based business solutions.
Shopmatic’s aggressive expansion will also include the firm’s launch in the Philippines within the next three months, and roll-outs in Indonesia and Thailand in the early part of the second quarter in 2020.
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