Snapcart raises US$3mil in pre-series A funding

  • Funds will be used to further game-change market and analytics for offline purchases
  • Focus on improving OCR, machine learning and data sciences technology; expand sales ops

 

Snapcart raises US$3mil in pre-series A funding

 

SNAPCART announces the close of their US$3 million Pre-Series A Funding round led by Vickers Venture Partners and their existing investors -- Wavemaker Partners, SPH Media Fund Pte Ltd, the investment arm of Singapore’s media group Singapore Press Holdings Limited, and a consortium of market research professional angel investors across the region.

In January 2016, Snapcart had announced they had raised US$1.7 million Pre-Series A Bridge Round. Participants in that fund-raising round were Wavemaker Partners, SPH Media Fund Pte Ltd and Ardent Capital.

Snapcart is an application that offers shoppers cash back for scanning their receipts and gives brands access to offline purchase data that is analysed on a real-time basis with shopper-rich information.

“We believe we are disrupting the way market research is traditionally done, especially in the brick-and-mortar stores which contribute over 95% of total grocery sales. In a short period of time, we have successfully partnered with multinational companies including L’Oreal, Nestle, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble.

“We are extremely excited about our latest fund-raising announcement. Having the right support from our investors will only accelerate our growth and vision more rapidly,” says Snapcart founder and chief executive officer Reynazran Royono in a press release.

The funds raised will help the company improve OCR, machine learning and data sciences technology and further grow their sales team.

“In the next 12 to 18 months, we want to focus on product development and client acquisition. We are confident that with the successful completion of this funding round, we are on the right path,” adds Royono.

The strength of Snapcart comes from their analytics technology: An Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that reads the receipts with minimal to no human intervention and a big data machine learning platform similar to those used by companies like Amazon and Netflix.

“Snapcart has done an extremely impressive job of building a solution for an industry that has long been used to traditional methods. We are incredibly excited to be backing the team as they embark on their next phase of growth as they improve the OCR and machine learning technology, increase their data science team and work with more brands,” said Vickers Venture Partners associate director Terence Sim.

 

Snapcart raises US$3mil in pre-series A funding

 

Automated reading of the receipts provides the basis of real time analytics and drives efficiency and scalability of the business model supported by fraud detection capability to ensure quality user base in Snapcart’s panel.

Data captured from receipts at the user level is unprecedented in its details and granularity, and allows for more powerful, predictive analytics which brands will find useful to understand consumer buying patterns.

The key analytic products offered by Snapcart includes a real-time purchase behaviour analytics called Customer Analytics and Retail Tracking (CART), a behaviour-based survey platform Targeted Audience based Survey and Questionnaire (TASQ), and a tool to measure offline media attribution Offline Purchase Tracking and Insights (OPTI).

By providing brands a way to measure returns from media investments based on actual purchases – not just based on just views, impressions, or click-through-rates – Snapcart is paving the way in offline purchase analytics.

“B2B has always been our focus. We saw great potential in the Snapcart team and hence invested in them at early stage. Their solution is out of the box and will be of immense value to the industry they cater to. Most importantly, as an early stage investor, we back a team of highly capable and passionate entrepreneurs like this team building Snapcart, if it’s not them, they would not be where they are today,” Wavemaker Partners managing partner Paul B. Santos concluded.

Snapcart currently operates out of Indonesia and expanded to the Philippines in August 2016.

The company aims to reach 50 thousand monthly active users in the Philippines, the same as Indonesia, making their panel five times larger than their competitors.

 

Related Stories:

Indonesian e-grocers rise to the challenge

Snapcart ubah struk belanja jadi uang tunai

Dapat suntikan 23 Miliar, Snapcart siap ekspansi ke Filipina

 

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