Cube Asia, a Singapore-based online retail insights company offering granular market and competitive insights for consumer brands, retail companies, and investors, has on Wednesday announced that it has raised a seed round totaling $1.5 million.

This is Cube Asia’s first funding round. The round was led by Wavemaker Partners, with participation from M Venture Partners and several angels, including 7-Eleven Philippines Chief Executive Officer Victor Paterno, Smartkarma Co-Founder Raghav Kapoor, and Zenyum Co-Founder Julian Artope, Cube Asia said in a statement.

According to the statement, Cube Asia’s fresh funding will go to expanding its technology, product, and data teams to further enhance its data quality and MeterCube platform for customers across Southeast Asia.

“Our proprietary technology is a big-data machine that continuously aggregates data from public and proprietary sources, including extensive primary research, and triangulates across thousands of data points to produce an accurate and granular picture of Southeast Asia’s online retail landscape,

“It’s something we wish existed in our past lives as e-commerce practitioners and consultants, and we’re thrilled to bring it to market now,” said Sarabjit Singh, Co-Founder and Head of Data at Cube Asia.

Cube Asia was founded in 2022 by Sarabjit Singh and Simon Torring, who both have extensive experience in e-commerce from companies like McKinsey & Company and Sephora.

They started the company to radically improve the quality, recency, and granularity of market and competitive data available to companies that sell online in Southeast Asia.

Cube Asia’s mission is to enable its subscribers to make more data-driven decisions in areas like e-commerce pricing, discounts, assortment, and influencer engagements – thereby enabling more rapid and profitable online growth in Southeast Asia’s $170 billion e-commerce market.

The company also offers granular market size and market share insights to help brands make strategic decisions on new investments or product development.

Cube Asia’s first product is MeterCube for TikTok Shop, a data and insights suite that helps brands and retailers increase their revenue and profit on TikTok Shop by providing access to detailed insights, including up-to-date rankings of popular TikTok accounts, top-selling products in different categories, pricing and discount trends, and category-specific market sizing.

MeterCube for TikTok Shop is live in six markets across Southeast Asia and is available to brands, retailers, and other companies on a subscription basis.

Cube Asia counts emerging brands like ESQA Cosmetics, retailers like Little Farms, and institutional investment firms like IFC among its early customers.

The company’s first research report, published in December 2022 about the region’s social commerce landscape, has been widely downloaded and quoted by industry players and regional media publications.

Beyond TikTok Shop, Cube Asia will expand coverage to other popular e-commerce and social commerce channels like Shopee, Lazada, and Instagram through 2023.

“Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market has exploded in the last years, particularly during COVID-19, but access to market data and insights is still severely lacking. This has forced the region’s tens of thousands of consumer brands and retail companies to depend on guesswork in growing their businesses online,

“We’re excited to back Cube Asia as it helps companies make more data-driven decisions through a differentiated tech solution,” said Paul Santos, Managing Partner of Wavemaker Partners.

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