SNAPCART, an offline shopper and consumer insights startup, announced that it has closed a US$10 million (RM42.31 million) series A funding round led by existing investors Vickers Venture Partners, and includes funding from Social Capital, Kickstart Ventures, and Endeavor Catalysts.
Existing investors Wavemaker Partners and SPH Ventures also followed on in the round.
In March 2017, Snapcart announced they had raised US$3 million (RM12.7 million) in a Pre-Series A funding round also led by Vickers Venture Partners. Participants in that round were Wavemaker Partners and SPH Media Fund Pte Ltd.
Snapcart founder and chief executive officer Reynazran Royono tells Digital News Asia (DNA) via email that all of its Series A investors play important roles in its growth strategy and efforts to scale.
“In particular, we need investors who can help us execute our vision to revolutionise market research. This is where Vickers Venture Partners has shown their greatest support so far.”
Rey says that the funding allows the company to improve its current technology, further advance product development, solidify its proposition to clients, and expand into new markets.
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.
In terms of business growth, Snapcart has reached approximately 50,000 users respectively in Indonesia and the Philippines, where they operate.
“Given Snapcart’s business model that focuses on research, we prioritise the quality of our panel users versus the quantity of users. Our user base is already more than sufficient.
“More importantly, we also need to ensure unbiased data and that our panel users represent normal shopping behaviour in each country,” he adds.
Rey says that another key quality metric of user behaviour is to be able to get good longitudinal data.
“The retention rate of our current users is much more important than getting new users. We have created a gamification scheme within our app to attract our users to snap receipts regularly.”
Users who snap regularly will further advance their level and receive a higher cashback value than the new users.
Disrupting the market
Rey admits that it is not easy to disrupt an industry dominated by global players that have already existed for a long time.
“The clients are used to being serviced by these incumbents and in order for them to migrate to a new solution is a painfully long process.
“The great thing however is that more and more manufacturers realise the importance of having real-time analytics as well as understand ROI in a much more in-depth manner. This is where we have an advantage.”
Snapcart continues to build state-of-the-art technology and introduce new products to further enhance data capturing and help brands to optimise spending.
It also will introduce a new product, ‘Cashier’, which is designed to capture traditional trade information from mom-and-pop shops, thereby completing an entire overview of the retail landscape.
Vickers Venture Partners vice chairman Jeffrey Chi said, “We are thrilled that Snapcart is truly disrupting the market research industry that has been around for decades but was really slow to innovate.
“Snapcart’s innovative and robust technology builds the company’s foundation to scale globally. We’re really excited that Snapcart is already beginning not just to generate repeat revenues from their customers but are seeing these revenues grow rapidly. This is a testament as to how useful the product is to their customers.”
Snapcart currently operates in two countries, Indonesia and Philippines, and recently opened a Singapore office to focus on business development and client acquisition.
It also has plans to expand to multiple countries in the next two to three years.
—
As written in Digital News Asia here
