Loship team
Loship, a one-hour e-commerce delivery startup in Vietnam, announced today it has secured US$12 million in a pre-Series C round of equity financing co-led by BAce Capital, a VC firm backed by Ant Group, and the direct investment unit of Sun Hung Kai & Co., a Hong Kong-listed a leading alternative investment company.
The co-investors are MetaPlanet Holdings (Skype co-founder-backed VC firm in Estonia), Wealth Well (Saudi Arabia), Prism Ventures (Singapore), and SQ Capital Group (Hong Kong).
A slew of individual investors also participated, including Mojtaba Akhbari (former Vice President of Starbucks), Tim Neville (CEO, APAC at FNZ Group), Ben Fitzpatrick (Director, Global Macro Sales at BNP Paribas), Wayne Cowden (founder and CEO at DASS-Inc.), Simon Eglise (MD at EC1 Partners), Quentin Flannery (Director of Ilwella), Jonathon Feil (Director at Prenzler Group), and Milan Reinartz (CEO at iVS).
The round comes close on the heels of Loship’s undisclosed bridge funding round led by MetaPlanet in February 2021.
Loship will use the proceeds from the latest round to deepen its presence in key markets, expand the business into new regions, and fuel its latest growth area — the B2B delivery offering for small F&B businesses and mom-and-pop shops.
“We have a very clear path to profitability as well as strategic plans on how to get there. Next on our agenda is to bring Loship services to customers living in all parts of Vietnam, especially the lower-tier markets. We will also use the funding to drive forward instant commerce delivery in under an hour,” said co-founder and CEO Trung Hoang Nguyen.
As part of the deal, BAce Capital founder Benny Chen has joined Loship’s Board of Directors. He was on the board of Zomato and Paytm with extensive experience in food delivery and fintech startups across China, India, and Southeast Asia.
Established in 2017, Loship is a distribution network, filling the massive demand for immediate deliveries. It has a wide range of services including food delivery (Loship), grocery delivery (Lomart), ride-hailing (Loxe), medicine delivery (Lomed), laundry service (Lozat), package delivery (Lo-send), flower delivery (Lohoa), beauty products delivery (LoBeauty), and B2B supply delivery (Losupply).
Currently, Loship has a fleet of more than 70,000 drivers and 200,000 merchants. It serves almost two million customers across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, Can Tho, and Bien Hoa.
“Loship creates a strong ecosystem which adds value to small business, customers as well as riders. Under Trung’s entrepreneurship and leadership, we saw the company get much stronger during the pandemic by constantly bringing product and service innovation to its merchants and users. We strongly believe in local entrepreneurs to understand the market and people’s needs better in a great potential market like Vietnam,” said Chen.
Loship had earlier closed its Series A and B rounds from several investors, including South Korea’s Smilegate Investment, Hana Financial Group, and Golden Gate Ventures. Prior to these, it bagged a bridge funding in a Vulpes Investment-led bridge round in October 2020.
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Image Credit: Loship
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