ShopUp, Bangladesh’s largest full-stack B2B commerce platform, announced that it has raised a follow-on $65 million round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures.
The company had previously completed a $109 million Series B six months ago, with participation from Valar Ventures, Tiger Global, Prosus Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Veon Ventures, the company said in a statement on Monday.
Since then, the company said it has grown 4x times, and the existing investors are doubling down with this follow-on round, ShopUp said.
ShopUp said it has been playing an instrumental role in digitizing and modernizing Bangladesh’s retail space, solving inherent inefficiencies of traditional supply chain, logistics, and finance.
According to its statement in September last year, Bangladesh is home to one of the most fragmented retail markets in Asia, with 98 percent of all retail consumption happening through 4.5 million small neighbourhood mom-and-pop retail shops spread out across the country. These shops face daily struggles when procuring goods from multiple suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers.
Problems such as product unavailability, lack of price transparency and unreliable delivery severely hamper their ability to manage day-to-day businesses. On top of that, a staggering 73 percent of small retailers sell on credit to end customers, whereas in Bangladesh, only 27.5 percent of small businesses have access to formal financing. Such fundamental barriers have hampered the growth of these neighborhood mom and pop shops for decades.
With an aim to put these 4.5 million retailers in the driving seat of the country’s economic growth, ShopUp launched three products to remove the inherent blockers within traditional supply chain, logistics, and financing. These products are – Mokam, a one-stop B2B commerce app; REDX, an end-to-end logistics platform; and Baki, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) product for small retailers, the company said then.