Two months after its seed round announcement, Singapore-based startup Upmesh has raised a $7.5 million pre-Series A round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The new funding brings its total raised so far to $10.5 million.
Upmesh will use the pre-Series A funding to expand its regional presence in Southeast Asia and launch its first Instagram live selling app and back-end automation features like logistics automation. It also plans to double down on its live commerce products.
Since its seed round, Upmesh has nearly doubled its online merchants in less than three months with a growing merchant base by 30% month on month. In October, Upmesh was used by almost 300 live commerce merchants in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines, with an annualized gross merchandise value of $40 million.
Upmesh’s tool helps merchants grow sales through analytics to identify their best-selling product items and patterns in buying behaviors. Its tool also provides e-commerce functions that automatically capture orders made in livestream comments and send a checkout link to buyers. At the same time, sellers go live on social media platforms like Facebook Live and Instagram Live.
Upmesh competes with e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Lazada and SaaS tools, including Shopline, but the company offers live commerce on social media that attracts more buyers and audience and provides automation to help customers grow their business, said Wong Zi Yang, CEO and co-founder of Upmesh.
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Upmesh also tailors its order capturing tools to meet the expectations of sellers and buyers in different Southeast Asia countries unlike other companies that provide order-capturing tools for live commerce like CommentSold and Dibsly, Wong said in October.
Upmesh users range from mom-and-pop street shops selling on livestreams to supplement foot traffic to specialized live commerce sellers moving thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs).
“Live commerce is transforming e-commerce and shaping the buying behavior of the digital consumer in Southeast Asia. While Upmesh provides a full technology and service stack to enable live commerce, it is even more critical that the company is enabling small and medium online sellers at scale. Small and medium sellers form the fastest-growing segment in e-commerce and their needs are largely unmet. Upmesh is focused on meeting their needs,” said Kuo-Yi Lim, co-founder and managing partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures.
“We are glad to join forces with Monk’s Hill Ventures in our mission to transform e-commerce. We are united in our shared belief that community is the next frontier for e-commerce, and live commerce is the ideal medium for bringing community and commerce together,” said Wong.
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