Startup Ecosystem & Funding Startup to Watch BigGo product search engine raises $5M Series A for international expansion
BigGo, the product search engine and price comparison platform, has completed the first close of its Series A round at US$5M. The first closing is led by Silicon Valley-headquartered venture capital firm SOSV, Uni-President Group, and Kyber Capital.
For Uni-President Group, the giant Taiwanese food conglomerate company, BigGo is its second internet investment after the investment in Sea Group, Shopee’s parent company, in 2017.
The Silicon Valley–headquartered venture capital firm SOSV reinvests. BigGo graduated from MOX Batch 3, an SOSV accelerator for cross-border mobile internet. “MOX, the Mobile Only Accelerator operated by SOSV helps startups from around the world expand cross border into new markets without spending money on customer acquisition,” says William Bao Bean, General Partner at SOSV and Managing Director at MOX. “We have been happy to help BigGo launch into Thailand and hit profitability and excited to see them enter Japan and other SE Asia markets next.”
For Kyber Capital, a global blockchain and financial innovation venture fund, this is the first time investing in the internet industry. Kyber Capital founder Thomas Hu says, “Kyber sees great prospects in BigGo’s product vision and development strategy in the vertical search engine category, as well as monetization potential by combining decentralized fintech with big data on BigGo’s platform.”
BigGo plans to use the funds to further product development and to expand internationally in markets such as Thailand, Japan, and the European Union.
“In 2020, we expect to see a 300% increase in revenue from this year. We also expect a substantial increase in users from 11 million to 25 million users,” says Kevin Yen, CEO of BigGo.
BigGo currently sells more than 4,500 Shopee orders per day, with a record high of more than 10,000 orders in a single day. Many e-commerce companies experience substantial increases in conversions and revenue growth of their products on the BigGo platform.
BigGo business includes price comparison, cashback, offline price comparison, price history tracking, and extension services. The platform is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Thai.
BigGo offers historical price tracking features and price reduction alerts.
BigGo’s historical price tracking feature allows users to track any product’s pricing history for up to 90 days. Users can subscribe to price alerts and receive notifications in real-time when pricing has changed, ensuring great buying opportunities will never be missed.
The browser extension helps users to buy the best price.
BigGo Helper is a browser extension that will automatically notify and display available discount codes on the checkout page of participating e-commerce sites, BigGo Helper browser extension is available on Chrome and Firefox browsers.
The Next Step for BigGo
BigGo started its international expansion launching BigGo Thai in November 2018. Since launching, it has become the top price comparison website in Thailand with an Alexa website traffic ranking of 124 for all websites in Thailand. BigGo has recently entered into a partnership with Thairath, Thailand’s largest news and media with 25M monthly active users and 160M monthly pageviews, to accelerate its growth in the Thai market.
In August 2019, BigGo launched BigGo Japan and has formed a strategic alliance with Japanese e-commerce consultant BlueGoose.
“Currently, most online price-comparison aggregator websites still rely on merchants for pricing and product updates, however relying on merchant updates is not sustainable with the sheer volume of products and online merchants that exist across the Internet. BigGo’s proprietary search engine technology automatically captures the latest product and pricing across the entire Internet. We then are able to present the best online comparison shopping deals for our users,” says Kevin Yen, Founder and CEO of BigGo.
“BigGo’s vision has always been to solve problems for our online shoppers and to become the world’s biggest price comparison website.”
〔Original :Meet Startup @ TW〕
https://meet.bnext.com.tw/intl/articles/view/45746