Ecommerce platform Sendo gets US$51m from new investors
Ho Chi Minh City-based ecommerce portal Sendo.vn has raised US$51 million in a round of Series B funding from eight foreign investors, Sen Do Technology JSC (Sendo) said in a statement issued today, August 16, by PRNewswire.
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This can be regarded as one of the largest funding rounds for a Vietnamese startup. The investors’ individual investments have not been made public.
SoftBank Ventures Korea, Daiwa PI Partners and SKS Ventures are the new investors in this round.
Set up in 2000, SoftBank Ventures Korea is the only global early-stage venture capital arm of SoftBank Group, based in Seoul, the Republic of Korea. Meanwhile, SKS Ventures has many years of experience in Vietnam and other Asian countries.
Daiwa PI Partners is a Japanese entity of Daiwa Securities Group, which engages in the principle investment business.
Since its establishment, when it started out as a player in the debt investment field in 1998, the firm has been broadly expanding its business, which now extends not only to debt investment but also to private equity and energy investment.
SBI and Beenos previously took part in a US$18-million Series A investment in Sendo in 2014. Beenos, which offers cross-border ecommerce services, is trying to link Sendo’s offerings with its own.
“The ecommerce market in Vietnam is estimated to be worth US$2.2 billion in 2017, and it will grow to US$30 billion by 2026.
Beenos decided to make an additional investment in view of the growth of the ecommerce market and the possibility of value improvement on Sendo’s platform,” said Beenos President and CEO Shinta Naoi.
“The funding will help the company to expand the C2C (consumer-to-consumer) platform Sendo, launch the B2C (business-to-consumer) marketplace SenMall and make SenPay the leading fintech platform in Vietnam,” said Nguyen Dac Viet Dung, executive chairman and co-founder of Sendo.
He added that the company aims to grow its merchandise sales to US$1 billion in 2020 from the current US$330 million.
Founded in 2012, Sendo is an online platform on which individuals and small businesses sell their goods.
It is one of Vietnam’s largest ecommerce companies, with over 10 million products listed by some 300,000 sellers.
