Last week, Singapore-based Graas announced the acquisition of two companies –Shoptimize and SELLinALL– following a US$40 million Series A funding round led by Galaxy (Kejora-led SPV), Performa (multi-billion European Asset Manager-led SPV), Integra Partners, Yuj Ventures (Xander Group) and AJ Capital.

Dubbing itself as a “Growth-as-a-Service” solution, through these milestones, Graas aims to help brands ‘turbo-charge’ their e-commerce businesses. The company says it is currently working with 250 customers, with its platforms managing four million SKUs and 45 million data points every month –a number they expect to increase as it expands into the region.

“The growth and evolution of e-commerce in Southeast Asia (SEA) are far outpacing brands’ ability to effectively use the new tools and channels available to them – which ultimately puts pressure on their profit margins as they struggle to optimise their eCommerce operations,” writes Prem Bhatia, Co-founder of Graas, in an email interview.

“Consider a brand that has a modest e-commerce presence of 50 SKUs, selling across two countries. If they sold through three different channels, using three different advertising mediums, this translates to an approximate 9,000 decisions that need to be made and executed every month. The more variables added to this equation, the greater the complexity. In addition, data from these multiple sources are typically siloed, which makes meaningful analysis extremely labour intensive and hinders brands from being able to use this data to make effective decisions,” he continued.

Now that we have a general idea of what problem they aim to solve, what exactly is the work that they are doing? And what will their next steps be? In this interview, e27 discovers more details about the company –that we believe we will hear more of.

Also Read: In the age of e-commerce, complete and accurate data analytics is key

Seizing opportunities in the fastest growing e-commerce markets

Graas was founded by Prem Bhatia and Ashwin Puri, who had been involved in the martech field for some time. In addition to that, they are also serial entrepreneurs and investors. According to Bhatia, this allows them a “close view” of the markets, particularly the challenges faced by CMOs of top brands.

“India and SEA are the fastest growing regions for e-commerce in the world, with US$200 billion in GMV. Despite this growth, e-commerce accounts for less than 10 per cent of all regional retail. Unlike the US and the China markets, where there are strong dominant players in the ecosystem, these regions have become a battleground, with many players vying for market share,” he explains the background behind the company’s founding.

“As such, there is significant headroom to grow, and brands are hungry to evolve their e-commerce strategy. However, brands are finding it increasingly difficult to manage profitability as the e-commerce sector becomes more complex. Given the increase in some marketplaces, revenue shares with various platforms, advertising and customer acquisition costs (CAC) and fluctuating warehouse and last mile costs, margins are under threat,” he says.

This is why Graas has the vision to reduce this complexity through the use of a single dashboard, which is expected to brands reduce their time to market and create a streamlined, informed approach to marketing, inventory and content management.

“Our plug-and-play algorithmic solution gives brands the equivalent of an in-house data scientist. As a result, we are already seeing exponential increases in our clients’ growth via our solution, and that’s why we have defined a new category for Graas: ‘Growth-as-a-Service’. We believe this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity founded at the intersection of AI, e-commerce, adtech and fintech,” says Bhatia.

Also Read: How e-commerce merchants can capture growth in international markets

Earlier, he has explained the challenges that Graas aims to solve, but he further explains how they aim to do it in three ways:

1. Graas connects previously siloed business segments to reduce complexity and helps brands identify opportunities to scale their e-commerce business. This also creates a unified data pool.

2. It applies a proprietary AI engine we have developed to this data pool. This engine acts as an in-house data scientist, analysing vast amounts of information. It predicts trends and gives real-time insights and actionable recommendations that allow brands to stay ahead of the competition.

3. The solution turns insights into action by giving brands the tools to seamlessly execute data-driven recommendations that span: marketplace storefronts, brand.coms, social and conversational commerce, performance marketing, inventory management, warehousing and last mile logistics.

Apart from India, SEA is also a huge market for the company. It focuses on Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

What is on their agenda

There are several milestones that Graas has made following their Series A funding round, including the acquisitions of Indian D2C and data specialist Shoptimize and SEA marketplace specialist SELLinALL. You might recognise the latter as one of the companies on the Echelon Top100 list in 2015.

According to Bhatia, the acquisitions have allowed the company to integrate not only their technology but also the expertise and knowledge of its teams.

At the moment, Graas has over 350 employees across 11 offices in seven countries, and it is looking forward to continuing to expand.

Also Read: The long and winding road to e-commerce profitability

Apart from that, there are also several plans related to product innovation that Graas aims to achieve this year.

“Our goal is to use our AI engine to deliver actionable recommendations across advertising, storefront (content & promotions and inventory and supply chain. We’re the only AI engine that covers the entire e-commerce business, end-to-end,” he closes.

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Image Credit: Graas

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