E-commerce Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider Graas, an abbreviation for Growth-as-a-Service, on August 17 said it raised $40 million in the first close of its Series A round led by Galaxy (Kejora-led SPV), Performa (multi-billion European Asset Manager-led SPV), Integra Partners, Yuj Ventures (Xander Group) and AJ Capital.
A clutch of Southeast Asia and India-based angel investors including Harish Bahl of Smile Group, Saurabh Mittal, and a few senior executives global tech giants Facebook and Google among others across deep tech, retail, ad tech and private equity also participated in the round.
The start-up didn’t disclose valuation and or the overall round size expected post second close of Series A.
A part of the fresh capital raised has already been deployed to acquire 100 percent of D2C and data specialist Shoptimize Inc and Southeast Asia’s marketplace specialist SELLinALL to boost Graas’ go-to-market strategy in the region. The founders of both companies have joined the board of Graas and will continue to be a part of the combined entity.
The fresh funding will also be utilised to expand the Singapore-based start-up’s team which has more than 350 employees in seven countries, apart from growing in the Southeast Asian region. Graas plans to increase team size to 400 by the end of 2022.
Founded in 2022, by serial entrepreneurs and martech veterans Prem Bhatia and Ashwin Puri, Graas integrates previously siloed e-commerce data to enable real-time decision-making.
Targeted at sellers of e-commerce platforms across seven Southeast Asian countries, Graas is a one-stop dashboard for sellers to track all metrics of running an online business including advertisement response, revenue, stock inventory, sales, customer response, logistics etc. in real time, co-founder and CBO Ashwin Puri explained Moneycontrol. Puri is a former managing director at Facebook.
The artificial intelligence engine of the platform predict trends and deliver actionable recommendations that span marketplace storefronts, brand.coms, social and conversational commerce, performance marketing, inventory management, warehousing and last mile logistics, the company said.
The product is currently at proof of concept stage with around 100 customers and is expected to go live in October.
Graas serves over 250 customers and its AI predictive engine processes over 45 million data points every month across 4 million stock keeping units (SKUs), it said.
“While India and SEA are the fastest growing regions for e-commerce in the world with US$200B in GMV, they still account for less than 10 percent of all retail in the region. There is significant headroom to grow, however, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to manage profitability. Given the increase in the number of marketplaces, revenue shares with various platforms, advertising and customer acquisition costs (CAC) and fluctuating warehouse and last mile costs, margins are under threat,” CEO Bhatia said.
"Graas’ vision is to demolish data silos, increase brands’ speed to market and create a streamlined, informed approach to marketing, inventory and content management - all in one dashboard. Our plug-and-play algorithmic solution gives brands the equivalent of an in-house data scientist.
Jinesh Patel, Managing Partner, Integra Partners, said the intersection of AI, e-commerce, adtech and fintech presented a multi-billion dollar opportunity in Southeast Asia and India.
"Partnering with Graas is exciting for us because they have not only seen this gap in the market, but have created a solution that defines an entirely new category,” he said.
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