Arrow, a Singapore-based eCommerce checkout solution, announced Tuesday a $4.8 million seed fundraise led by Sequoia Capital India and supported by Alpha JWC and Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth.

High-profile angel investors such as Ooi Huey Tyng (current board member at AIG and Maxis), Steve Vickers (Chief Operating Officer at Paysend), and Hassan Ahmed (Head of Southeast Asia at Coinbase) also participated in the round, Arrow said in a statement.

The funds will be used to accelerate Arrow’s mission to make it easier for consumers across Southeast Asia (SEA) to buy online and allow merchants to easily navigate the region’s complex payments and sales channel landscape.

“Our mission is to partner with merchants to create a fast and frictionless checkout experience for consumers – regardless of their location or the channel they are buying on. In 2021, Asia suffered the world’s highest cart abandonment rates with 74 percent of customers in Asia Pacific (APAC) abandoning their carts due to clunky checkout processes. This poses a huge problem, which often goes unaddressed by merchants,

“We founded Arrow to change this: imagine Arrow as the express checkout lane at your local supermarket or airport priority immigration lanes. We’re here to change the consumer experience and help merchants to increase their revenue by just improving the checkout experience instead of only focusing on areas like promo codes and performance marketing,” said Liat Beng Neo, Co-Founder of Arrow.

According to the statement, in just 15 months since the launch, 100+ merchants across fashion, beauty, wellness and home decor are using Arrow and some are already seeing more than 20 percent increase in conversion rates.

“The pandemic induced-growth for eCommerce across SEA has been unprecedented and with more consumers coming online and more merchants springing up, there is a huge opportunity for Arrow to make a difference. In addition, Shoppers are increasingly finding new channels to discover and interact with their favourite brands and shopping experiences are getting more portable and instantaneous,

“The seed funding raise is the start of a new chapter for Arrow. In support of our mission, we will be looking to grow our team and establish ourselves on the ground in key markets within the SEA region to ensure we are supporting consumers and merchants across this highly nuanced and fragmented region,” said Sebastian Roervig, Co-Founder of Arrow.

Founded by payment specialists Liat Beng Neo and Sebastian Roervig, Arrow’s solution tackles the highly-fragmented SEA payments ecosystem faced by merchants, by working as a layer on top of payment gateways that can be easily integrated to provide a hassle-free checkout experience for customers.

The firm offers a seamless mobile checkout for cards and alternate payment methods like e-wallets, bank transfers and buy-now-pay-later, catering to the high propensity of mobile-first shoppers across the region.

The checkout-as-a-service solution can be embedded across all digital shopping channels such as social media, chat, digital ads, print media and e-commerce sites.

“About $25 billion to $30 billion of eCommerce gross merchandise value (GMV) in Southeast Asia is transacted on direct-to-consumer brand websites or on social platforms. Unlike on horizontal marketplaces, there is still a high failure rate for payments on these transactions, due to a lack of sophisticated check-out and cart conversion tools,

“This is the gap that Arrow is solving. The team at Sequoia Capital India are big believers of this thesis, and are excited to back the Arrow team to crack open this large opportunity” said Aakash Kapoor, Vice President, Sequoia India.

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