Telecoms and internet group SoftBank committed $2bn in South Korea-based e-commerce platform Coupang via its Vision Fund. Coupang was reportedly valued at $9bn in the round. Coupang runs an online marketplace that offers over 120 million products for sale, 4 million of which are available for one-day delivery through logistics system Rocket. The company is expected to record a total of $5bn in sales this year, although its losses had reportedly also risen substantially since 2014. With the new funding, Coupang will look to reduce delivery times while introducing artificial intelligence-equipped product recommendation system as well as a one-touch payment option.
SoftBank also led a funding round raised by Indonesia-based peer-to-peer e-commerce platform Tokopedia, which raised $1bn. The transaction reportedly valued the company at about $7bn. SoftBank has been an investor since 2014 when its subsidiary Softbank Internet took part in a $100m round raised by Tokopedia. The company also counts other corporate backers like Japan-based internet group CyberAgent, internet company Netprice.com and financial services firm SBI. Founded in 2009, Tokopedia runs an e-commerce platform that enables its users to set up their own online store rather than prioritising larger producers and sellers. As of August 2018, the company claimed to have over 4 million merchants and more than 80 million active monthly users.
As shown on the GCV Analytics historical bar chart here, corporate venturers have been active in the e-retail and e-commerce space in recent years, particularly in large deals. The latter is evidenced by the total estimated dollar amounts, which represent sum totals of the entire rounds. The dollar value of such deals went up ten-fold from $925m in 2013 to over $10bn in 2017. The number of corporate-backed deals also registered a significant increase during the same period from 33 rounds in 2013 up to 65 in 2015 but subsequently started to descend to 60 in 2016 and 52 in 2017. By the time of writing, there were 34 such deals in 2018 with an estimated $5.79bn of total capital raised. It must be noted, however, these figures represent only general e-retail and e-commerce enterprises and exude product or category-specific portals (e.g. fashion and apparel online retialers or vehicle marketplaces) that also constitute a significant part of the broader e-commerce space.
