Business software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup True Platform announced Monday its recently closed $3.5 million Seed funding from January Capital, Alpha JWC Ventures, BEENEXT, FPT Corporation and other angel investors.
The funding round was led by January Capital, a venture capital firm in Singapore with a portfolio of 40 startups from pre-seed round to Series C in Asia Pacific area, True Platform said in a statement.
Founded in late 2021, the startup prepares to launch two major products later this year: Success.net, a customer-centric platform to help companies accelerate sales and services; and Rework.com, an operation platform to help companies work together. The two classical problems would be solved by some novel approaches, as noted by the founder, Hung Pham.
“The main goal of the funding round is to accelerate product development as software engineers will be our future,” said True Platform Founder Hung Pham.
“We shared about the foundation of True Platform and its capital call with just a very few venture capitals who we have connected for long. We got an initial commitment of more than $5 million in one month of talking, however, $3.5 million is well enough at this stage of the company,” he added.
Hung graduated from Stanford with majors in Computer Science and Mathematics, and previously founded Base.vn in 2016, an enterprise SAAS platform in Vietnam with more than 7,000 customers.
“Today, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) globally face a lack of budget and bandwidth to evaluate, provision, and maintain the different tools for their respective functions (e.g. human resource, operation, customer support, finance). We recognize a need to provide a unified and affordable operating system for SMEs that enables a consistent user experience. More importantly, we are backing the founder who has done it before – having founded a SAAS company previously to achieve 7,000+ customers in 6 years,” said Jason Edwards of January Capital.
Alpha JWC Ventures and BEENEXT are two other venture capital firms to join the round. They previously backed Base.vn which has grown 20 times in revenue within 3 years before making a successful exit to FPT Corporation in May 2021.
“It’s not every day that you meet founders as visionary and capable as Hung, so when we do, we’d love to follow his dream once again. True Platform’s big ambition on the global SaaS market will not be easy, but we have a strong conviction that Hung and his team will be able to do it, and we are very excited to embark on this partnership journey with them,” said Chandra Tjan, Alpha JWC Ventures Co-Founder and General Partner.
Alpha JWC Ventures’ portfolio has four unicorns so far and 27 other companies that are very close to unicorn status. It recently raised $450 million to become the largest early-stage venture capital fund in Southeast Asia.
“We have worked with Hung and his team for many years and had a firm belief in his commitment and leadership. We are happy to invest in True again,” said Dirk Van Quaquebeke, BEENEXT’s Managing Partner.
BEENEXT has invested in startups from Pre-seed round to Series E, with a lot of focus in SAAS.
Meanwhile, FPT Corporation is one among several largest global software vendors with more than 37,000 employees in 26 countries. The participation of FPT and two previous backers strengthens the strategic movement of True in the global SAAS landscape.