Dropee funding
The story: Malaysian B2B e-procurement platform Dropee, has raised US$1.3 million in funding right after its graduation from Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch.
Investors: Y Combinator, Ondine Capital, Vynn Capital, Brama One Ventures, John Devor (COO of Touchpoint Games), Jason Tsai (Machine Learning Lead of GooglePay), and a number of other angel investors.
Plans with the money: Lennise Ng, CEO and Co-founder of Dropee, said: “With the newly injected capital, we plan to fully assist and automate the on-boarding process for these wholesale businesses.”
What does Dropee do?: Started in 2017, Dropee is a SaaS-enabled marketplace that connects brands with local retailers in Southeast Asia. It is on a mission to help wholesale buyers find the best product and suppliers for their business.
The platform allows retailers to discover, purchase and manage inventories for their store all on a single marketplace platform — and its software tool for suppliers helps businesses to deal with all the pain points of a growing customer database, from ordering to payments. This saves retailers and suppliers time and money, allowing them to focus on what’s most important: building and growing their business.
What are its products?: The company offers two products — 1) Dropee Marketplace: a platform where retailers and business buyers can search and source from new and existing suppliers via a single platform; 2) Dropee Direct: a B2B e-commerce SaaS for wholesalers and brands to bring their offline trading processes online.
As of today, Dropee has helped companies such as British American Tobacco, Petronas, and many others to move their B2B procurement and trading processes online.
SFA’s launches Grants and Jobs Portal
The story: The Singapore FinTech Association (SFA) has launched a comprehensive Grants and Jobs Portal.
What is it for?: The portal currently has over 500 job postings and will enable job seekers to access the latest job vacancies, available grants, relevant training opportunities and latest news within the fintech sector.
SFA has also collaborated with organisations, including the Institutes of Higher Learning, to generate content to the portal.
In addition, the Grants and Jobs portal will be highlighting various schemes available under the SGUnited Traineeship and Skills programmes.
SFA’s other initiatives: Since the onset of COVID-19 and after a survey conducted with its members in March 2020, SFA has pivoted quickly and worked closely with key stakeholders within the sector to progressively introduce a range of timely and purposeful initiatives. These initiatives come in the form of monetary and non-monetary assistance to help FinTech companies retain jobs and facilitate business growth despite disruption to normal business activities.
aCommerce gets new COO
The story: Thai e-commerce enabler aCommerce has appointed Luca Altomare as the Group Chief Operating Officer. In this role, he will be responsible for managing country heads and driving operational excellence.
He previously served as SVP of distribution for Southeast Asia at Li & Fung Group and worked at specialist consulting firm Value Partners. Luca will report to Paul Srivorakul.
Other appointments: The firm has also named Peter Kopitz (Co-founder and former COO) as Group Chief Commercial Officer, Phensiri Sathianvongnusar as Chief Business Officer, and Graeme Kingshott as Group Finance Director.
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Image Credit: Dropee
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