E-commerce firm Sendo nets $61 mln in latest funding round

The investment will come from existing shareholders as well as new international investors including Indonesia’s EV Growth and Thai banking group Kasikornbank, Sendo said in a press release Wednesday.

Existing investors including financial services company SBI Group, retailer BEENOS, private equity firm Daiwa PI Partners, and web services consultancy Digital Garage from Japan, as well as venture fund SoftBank Ventures Asia of South Korea, all of which had previously backed Sendo’s $51 million Series B round in 2018, returned for its Series C round.

Hai Linh Tran, CEO and co-founder of Sendo, said that the funds will be used to expand the breadth of its existing integrated platform offering to both sellers and consumers, as well as to further deepen its technology moat.

Founded in 2012 as a spin-off of Vietnam’s largest IT service company FPT Corporation, Sendo focuses on tier 2 cities largely untapped by other e-commerce firms, home to 70 million Vietnamese people.

The company claims it caters to 500,000 sellers, with an estimated 17 million distinct items listed on its platform, as well as 12 million customers.

In the third quarter of 2019, Sendo surpassed domestic rival Tiki to rank second among top 10 e-commerce sites in Vietnam with the highest monthly traffic numbers, according to Malaysia-based market research firm iPrice's latest data released recently.

Sendo’s web visits reached 30.9 million per month in Q3, up 10.1 percent against Q2, second after Singapore-based Shopee, which remained in top position with 34.5 million, down 10.6 percent from Q2.