Here are the top 10 most well-funded internet companies in Singapore

Ask any founder in Asia which country they plan to visit to raise funding, and chances are that diminutive Singapore will come up tops. And it won’t be too surprising – when it comes to startups, its government is probablyone of the most supportive in the world. Plus, there are many VC firms and private investors – including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin – who have chosen to call the island-state their home.

With so much money going into the local tech scene, one wonders which Singapore-based tech firms are the grand winners in the race to get funded. To quench your curiosity, we’ve done the heavy lifting and identified the top 10 most well-funded internet companies in Singapore.

Note: all figures shown below are of public funding rounds, and do not include undisclosed amounts.

1. Lazada, US$686 million (Techlist profile)

The fashion ecommerce retailer is one of Rocket Internet’s greatest successes so far, and is the only unicorn on this list with a valuation of US$1.25 billion. Thanks to its recent shift to a marketplace model for third-party merchants, Lazada’s sales – or gross merchandise volume (GMV) – doubled in the second half of 2014 as compared to the former half, bringing its total GMV for that year to roughly US$274.2 million.

2. Zalora, US$238 million (Techlist profile)

The other Rocket Internet-backed startup on the list, Zalora’s last-seen numbers aren’t exactly rosy. According to leaked documents, it had a net negative income of US$91 million in 2012, expecting to reach profitability by 2015. Whether or not it will actually do so this year remains to be seen, but regardless, the company has certainly won the confidence of several investors who have seen fit to invest substantial amounts.

While there was speculation that Zalora might go public in 2014, its recent plans to merge with four other fashion brands under Rocket Internet’s umbrella to form the Global Fashion Group say otherwise. Rocket Internet, however, did launch an US$8.2 billion initial public offering, which means Zalora might be seeing more capital flowing into its coffers soon.

3. iCarsClub, US$70.5 million (Techlist profile)

A peer-to-peer car rental platform is a great idea in Singapore, given the high costs of car ownership here. Nailing the execution, however, is a whole different ballgame, and iCarsClub has received some negative publicity in 2014 regarding just that. Still, having a war chest at its disposal will certainly help if it is directed in the right direction. iCarsClub and its Beijing-based spinoff PPzuche now have over 120,000 private cars available in their databases.

4. PropertyGuru, US$53 million (Techlist profile)

Online property classifieds are a hotly-contested industry in Southeast Asia, but somehow PropertyGuru have managed to stay ahead of the pack. In Singapore, 99.co is the latest challenger. According to the former’s calculations, however, PropertyGuru has managed to achieve 87 percent market share in Singapore in terms of the total time people spend on the site. Data from Alexa and SimilarWeb also place PropertyGuru ahead of other big players, such as iProperty and STProperty.

CEO Steve Melhuish had revealed a couple of years ago that the company might go public, but nothing has happened since then. 2015 might be the year PropertyGuru joins the small but growing list of Singaporean success stories.

5. Reebonz, US$40 million (Techlist profile)

Besides the Rocket Internet companies listed above, Reebonz is probably the next most well-known name locally when it comes to ecommerce stores. It takes a different tack from the rest with its focus on luxury goods, and last year bought over a similar website called Clout Shoppe from SingPost to boost its reach.

In August 2014, there was speculation that Reebonz – together with gaming hardware giant Razer – might be going public, with reports that the ecommerce startup was looking for investors. There have, however, been no updates on the matter since.

6. Bubbly, US$39 million (Techlist profile)

The earlier half of 2014 are days that the team at Bubbly would probably want to forget. During that period, the social networking startup received multiple offers for acquisition, and in the process laid off its management team and restructured the company for a deal that turned sour and fell through.

While CEO Thomas Clayton had initially made up his mind to liquidate the company, a few weeks later it was acquired for an undisclosed amount by India-based Altruist, a mobile social networking services provider that has its presence in several markets across Europe, Africa, and Asia.

7. MyRepublic, US$37.5 million (Techlist profile)

MyRepublic probably has the most ambitious goal on this list: to become Singapore’s fourth telco. But it’s not content to become just another local player – it also recently went to New Zealand with a free three month trial offer of a 100Mbps ultra-fast fibre broadband.

Last we heard, the telco startup signs up about 2,000 new customers a month, and was on pace to triple annual revenue in 2014 to US$15 million. 2015 will probably see it push further into the rest of Asia.

8. Migme, US$34.6 million (Techlist profile)

The social entertainment platform had an extremely eventful 2014. Since listing on the ASX in August, it has gone on to make a couple of key acquisitions – couple chat app LoveByte and penny auction startup Sold.sg – and one investment. In December, Migme had surpassed 9 million MAUs.

Ultimately, its vision is to create a “playful social ecommerce experience” for its users, with Chinese C2C marketplace Taobao as CEO Steven Goh’s inspiration.

9. Wego, US$34.5 million (Techlist profile)

From the left: Wego co-founders Craig Hewett and Ross Veitch

In 2013, the travel metasearch company claimed to be processing over $10 million in potential bookings every day, with a presence in 52 countries. It launched its iOS and Android app in mid-2014, which climbed to the number one spot in Indonesia’s iOS app store.

10. Viki, US$24.3 million (Techlist profile)

If you’re a Singaporean and haven’t heard of this particular crowdsourced video subtitling website, you must have been living under a rock. Viki was the star in the largest acquisition ever made for a Singapore-based startup in 2013, when it was bought by Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten for US$200 million.

A year later, the company reported that it has 35 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 25 million mobile users, up from 22 million MAUs with 10 million on mobile at the time of acquisition.

5 eCommerce Startups You Can Learn From

In the language of business, eCommerce can be compared to being one of the best things since sliced bread made it's debut. The U.S. market alone sees a massive increase in the number of businesses that succeed beyond the six month mark,RJMetrics has compiled a concise report of the current eCommerce growth trends.

A few weeks ago, Neil Patel -- CEO at QuickSprout -- published an interesting articleon his business website, a documentation of a step-by-step guide on how to optimize your eCommerce websites for search engines; still the number one source of organic traffic, leads and sales.

It got me thinking, about the number of eCommerce startups that have already made it, as well as those startups that have managed to grow without the traditional methods, on top of the number of people who reach out to me on frequent basis, I was able to locate some other interesting startups and their founders to see what their products are all about.

What does it take to run an eCommerce startup?

Catvertiser

Catvertiser is a self-serve Facebook ads management and optimization tool with users in over 70 countries across five continents. It helps marketers achieve higher ROI on their Facebook advertising budgets and save tons of time by automating many time-consuming processes.

eCommerce users appreciate such features as:

• CPA bidding on different types of campaigns such as website traffic generation or fan acquisition.
• Google Analytics integration that helps track and optimize based real effects such as purchases or leads generated.
• Hourly campaign statistics that help optimize for best hours generating most effective traffic.

amongst others there's plenty of features that allow for automation, a crucial feature if you want to spend time making great products, rather than single pointedly selling things.

Cirqle

Cirqle is a highly curated product platform for online retailers and consumers, as well as fashion influencers. Expect some stunning visual collections from some of the best product sellers in the World. Cirqle stands out with the concisely tailored list of products that deliver for all types, all beliefs, all your desires. Moreover, Cirqle provides influencers with a platform to monetise their content and retailers with the opportunity to launch campaigns through Cirqle's network of over 3000+ influencers.

In addition, Cirqle recruits social influencers for the marketing campaigns of the world's biggest fashion brands. By integrating their ecommerce and analytics platform into influencers sites, the company's able to track real time ROI of fashion companies marketing spend.

meowbox

meowbox is the best way to discover exciting toys and treats for your cat. meowbox is the original cat subscription box devoted to cats. You can expect a nicely packed, pretty box full of unique goodies, wrapped up beautifully, and delivered it to your doorstep every month. Cats are cool!

eCommerce features to adapt from meowbox:

• Each 'meowbox' is personalized by a unique greeting, written by hand.
• Shipping is always included, save your customers time worrying about extra spending.
• Create a community that's oriented around your product, rather than marketing goals. (e.g. meowbox is active on social media as a medium of sharing stories, and photos about cats)
• Quick and easy shopping page gets you from A to Z in less than two minutes.

community aspects are definitely growing in the field of eCommerce, a lot less thinking should go into the ways of marketing yourself everywhere you can, rather -- one should focus on making every new visitor count.

Pure Chat

Pure Chat is a customer support oriented platform that offers excellent service, reliable tools and features for incorporating a live chat feature within your eCommerce websites. Pure Chat lets you talk to dozens of customers at a time, which reduces the amount of time hat your customers need to hold in order to receive a response. You can easily integrate Pure Chat with your favorite website builders.

From an eCommerce point of view:

• Live website chat reduces costs, and allows to connect with prospects on the fly.
• Pure Chat, alongside live chat supports, also provides direct email support. Two in one.
• Research shows that simple feature such as live chat, can help to reduce time spent on support tickets by 40%.

be there when your customer needs you, we all know how quickly our minds can change about products and situations if we don't receive the answers we need in a timely and fashionable manner.

Moltin

Moltin provides developers with the building blocks needed to build eCommerce websites and mobile applications through a simple API. This includes components like inventory management, carts, checkout and payments for example. If you work on a custom built eCommerce platform, then Moltin is the choice for building truly remarkable eCommerce components to enrich the shopping experience.

Example components that Moltin can produce:

• Products
• 50+ Payment Providers
• Orders
• Shipping

as well as some technical stuff, like in-built CDN & Image Resizing (for bandwidth and performance), as well as custom data that you wish to incorporate behalf of your own company.

Which are your go-to eCommerce sites for inspiration and insight?

Pocketbook

Mobile payments leap forward but fall short on benefits for merchants

Last week saw a number of significant mobile payments announcements as multiple platforms laid the groundwork for more seamless purchasing experiences but still fell short of mobile payments’ full potential.

Visa, MasterCard, Samsung Pay and PayPal all tried to position themselves to take advantage of the expected surge in mobile shopping during the holiday season. However, last week’s news also shows that mobile payments still have some distance to travel before they are truly beneficial for merchants.

“The adoption of mobile payments hasn’t quite yet reached a point where they will benefit merchants in a major way,” said Gordon Baird, CEO of nD bancgroup. “By this time next year, however, it is possible that merchants will have moved closer to being able to integrate some form of direct mobile payments so that the POS experience for the consumer will be enriched, allowing the consumer to receive incentives in real time.

“In order for this to materialize, though, there needs to be tighter integration of a consumer bank account or equivalent mobile transaction account with near real-time interaction with the POS combined with data from the merchant,” he said.

Being prepared
For merchants, last week’s flurry of developments underscores the need to have a mobile payments strategy in place for the upcoming holiday season.

Visa’s announcement of an integration with Stripe could have the biggest immediate impact for merchants as they look to create more seamless in-app experience (see story).

“Visa investing in Stripe is an important validation of their strategy to the online/app space in conjunction with mobile proximity payments,” said Thad Peterson, senior analyst at Aite Group. “When linked with VDEP, their digital provisioning platform, they’ve created a seamless, secure path from the issuer to the merchant.

“As merchants look to integrate in-app experiences into a more holistic approach to the customer experience, this could be a pretty big deal,” he said.

Samsung Pay

Almost important for merchants was the news that Apple Pay is continuing to gain steam, as revealed in a report from Auriemma Consulting Group showing that 42 percent of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners have used Apple Pay.

The data suggests mobile users may be ready for mobile payments.

CurrentC’s debut
The developments also increase the pressure on CurrentC, the mobile payments app from a number of large retailers that said last week it will launch a trial in August at a limited number of retail locations, including Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins.

“The relatively high rate of trial shown in the Auriemma research at least implies that as distribution of NFC terminals increases, consumers will more predisposed to use mobile,” Mr. Peterson said. “The data could also be another challenge for the launch of CurrentC next month.

“The more customers who are aware of and comfortable with the Apple Pay user experience, the fewer will be likely to either carry another alternative or switch to a new payment platform,” he said. “The only possible exception would be if the user experience and value proposition for CurrentC is superior to Apple Pay and the other NFC wallets.”

The CurrentC app

Other news last week included PayPal’s demonstration that it is still in the game following its spinoff from eBay with a new Subway partnership (see story).

Additionally, MasterPass expanded significantly across the travel industry, through a new partnership with Citibank India and into the quick-service space with Burger King and Firehouse Subs (see story).

MasterCard also extended its partnership with Samsung to deliver Samsung Pay in Europe (see story).

“Despite all the discussion in this week’s news stories about progress or the breakthrough of mobile payments, there really isn’t much that is changing from a merchant’s perspective,” Mr. Baird said. “Apple Pay is still using the old-fashioned credit or debit card to complete the payment.

“These shifts don’t change the 30-year-old economic model,” he said. “The more dramatic change will occur when mobile payments happen with a fully integrated experience and break free from the legacy system and expensive, old technology.

“We need a new paradigm that uses the available technology beyond the 16-digit card. The 16-digit card number is the root of all hacking and fraud, and the space for innovation comes when mobile payments move past this and adopt encrypted private credentials.”