Althea, a South Korea-based beauty e-commerce platform backed by steel conglomerate Posco, has secured $7m in series B funding, E27 has reported.
The round included venture capital firms FirstFloor Capital and Tekton Ventures, state-owned investment bank Korea Development Bank, Innoven Capital, which functions as the venture debt arm of Singaporean state-owned investment firm Temasek, and Bridges Alliance Partners.
Founded in 2015, Althea operates an online shopping portal for South Korean beauty products with offshoots in the US and five Asian markets: Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.
The company trades on its reputation as a reliable source of genuine South Korean brands, and collects customer data as market research. It plans to use the series B capital to develop an own-brand product range and to expand into more markets.
Posco’s corporate venturing arm, Posco Ventures, had participated in Althea’s $3.5m series A round in May 2016 along with Tekton, investment firm Mirae Asset Ventures, and VC firms Cherubic Ventures and 500 Startups.
500 Startups had previously supplied an undisclosed amount of seed funding for Althea in October 2015, following an investment of undisclosed size by VC firm BonAngels Venture Partners five months before.