ShopUp, a Bangladesh-based business-to-business ecommerce startup in a Series B funding round has raised $75 million with Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures as the lead investor. This oversubscribed funding round is also the largest in the South Asian Market for an ecommerce startup.
The funding round also saw participation from Prosus Ventures along with existing investors Sequoia Capital India, VEON Ventures, and Flourish Ventures.
The fresh funding which brings ShopUp’s all-time raise to more than $100 million is also Prosus’ and Valar’s first deals in Bangladesh.
ShopUp plans to ramp up its operations by bringing small neighborhood grocery and retail shops online. Like India, in Bangladesh, more than 95% of retail business goes through neighborhood stores. Bangladesh has about 4.5 million mom-and-pop stores and the majority of them have no digital presence.
The recent funding for the startup has come just after ten months when it announced that in a Series A funding round it received a $22.5 million investment. With this new funding round, ShopUp’s total funding comes to more than $110 million.
ShopUp during this funding round has increased its ESOP pool three times.
The startup plans to bring millions of small retailers in the country to the forefront of Bangladesh’s economic growth. According to the CEO and co-founder Afeef Zaman, ShopUp is building best-in-class infrastructure to support retail operations across the country while adding new categories to serve the inadequately provided small retailers. The startup is also launching new financial products to meet the unstated needs of the retailers the company serves.
ShopUp has launched three products to remove roadblocks within the supply chain, financing, and logistics- REDX, and end-to-end logistics platform; Baki, a BNPL (buy now pay later) product for small retailers, and Mokam- one-stop B2B commerce app.
Over the last one year, ShopUp has seen 11X growth in the number of total shipments and over 13X growth in revenue. The startup has partnered with Bangladesh’s largest producers, manufacturers, and distributors to procure and supply inventories to small businesses. ShopUp’s logistics offerings are the largest in the country.
More about ShopUp
ShopUp is headquartered in Dhaka and has opened an office in Bengaluru, India last year. The startup was founded in 2017 by Afeef Zaman, Navaneetha Krishnan J., Ataur Rahim Chowdhary, Sujjayat Ali, and Siffat Sarwar.
The startup offers easy access to B2B sourcing, digital credit, last-mile logistics, and business management solutions to small retailers.
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