Peeba, the online business to business (B2B) wholesale platform in Hong Kong, said Thursday it has secured $4.2 million in seed funding led by Headline Ventures.

The company said in a statement that it will use the funds to deepen its localization efforts across 11 Asia Pacific (APAC) countries, as well as to further build out the machine learning technologies underlying its platform.

Founded in 2020, Peeba is a online B2B wholesale marketplace that provides independent retailers across Asia access to a curated catalog of unique brands, reduced inventory risk, higher operational efficiency, and lower costs. The company has created its B2B wholesale online platform to connect unique brands from around the world – including Asia – with independent retailers across APAC. The company has already onboarded 25,000 retail users (10 times growth in the last year), and 1,500 unique brands (three times growth in the last year), with over 100,000 products currently listed on the platform.

With the closing of its seed funding round, Peeba’s next steps are to use the funds to deepen localization. The company is expanding its local offices and ramping up hiring to improve local language support across 11 APAC countries and regions, including Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.

In addition, it is continuing to improve the platform’s underlying tech, which includes automated credit checks and credit risk analysis, and its machine learning-driven recommendations engine.

“Our mission is to transform how independent retailers discover and connect with unique brands, and bring Asia’s B2B wholesale retail supply chain into the modern era in the process. Peeba’s major value-add is how we reduce inventory risk for retailers, through our 60-day returns policy and ‘sell first, pay later’ model. That allows retailers to quickly adjust to post-pandemic realities with greater confidence,” said Jacky Lai, Chief Executive Officer of Peeba.

Peeba platform significantly reduces inventory risk for Asian retailers, who can return unsold goods within 60 days, no questions asked, encouraging them to test and adapt their product offerings with peace of mind. It also offers favorable payment terms to retailers based on an automated in-house credit assessment, meaning retailers can “sell first, pay later.”

By bringing the wholesale process onto one platform, the firm is leveling the playing field for Asia’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) retailers, who individually have low bargaining power to gain access to unique brands. The platform also lowers barriers to entry and expansion for unique brands seeking growth in Asia, by providing a single platform through which to attract and manage new channels, clients, and orders.

“We digitize new brand discovery, automate the negotiation and client management process, and streamline logistics and shipping by pooling orders. All this contributes to improving operational efficiency and lowering costs for all parties. Retailers love the smooth discovery to ordering process, and higher margins they get by sourcing products through Peeba,” said Kevin Cho, Co-Founder of Peeba.

Headline Ventures Partner and Co-Founder Akio Tanaka said Peeba is bringing about the next stage of global retail innovation, and the platform brings both emerging and traditional brands to the world of local retail in Asia.

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