The social commerce platform RateS today (22/2) announced Series A funding with an undisclosed value. Vertex Ventures and Genesis Alternative Ventures lead this funding. Previously, the Singapore-based startup had secured seed funding from Alpha JWC Ventures and Insignia Ventures Partners in 2018.
Fresh funds will be focused on developing RateS‘s business in Indonesia, including market penetration to tier 2 and 3 cities. The objective is to increase the number of resellers, which currently reached up around 500 thousand people.
“The benchmark for RateS ‘success lies in how much we can help increase reseller revenue and business [..] Our shared vision is to revolutionize social commerce through technology, create digital entrepreneurs, and increase digital literacy for people to run the business smoothly and more. profitable,” RateS’ Co-Founder & CEO, Jake Goh said.
Simply put, with the RateS application, people can start selling (becoming resellers) without having to buy goods beforehand. Users can set up their own stalls and select items to sell from the list available in the application. They will get special prices, which are then sold to consumers at market prices. Users focus on promotion and selling, while packaging, shipping and payment infrastructure are all managed by RateS.
“We see that the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia has developed into a competition for profit. On the other hand, RateS has discovered an effective way of entering cities in tier 2 and 3 in Indonesia, which can not only save costs, will but more importantly it has huge and untapped market potential. With the pandemic that threatened the livelihoods of many people, we are delighted that RateS has been and will continue to be a useful platform to empower those in need,” Vertex Ventures SEA’s Managing Partner, Chua Joo Hock said.
In Indonesia, there are several social commerce services that strives to win the market with their own unique values. For example, Halosis, they focused on sales channels in the messaging application at the beginning of their debut, for this reason, a chatbot was introduced into the application to facilitate the transaction conversion process.
Woobiz also runs a similar business model, by emphasizing the aspects of empowering women in the regions. In addition, there are several other applications such as Jamanow, BorongBareng, Taptalk.io, and Super which also make it easier for resellers to restock.
The McKinsey report states, social commerce is expected to grow into a business sector valued at up to $25 billion by 2022. RateS seeks to maximize this potential. From the internal data collection, their service coverage has reached 400 cities/regencies by 2020.
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Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian