Thailand-based e-commerce company Zilingo has secured $8m in a series A round featuring trading and technology firm Susquehanna International Group, Business Standard reported today.
Venture capital firm Venturra Capital led the round, while Sequoia India also contributed money. The round follows $1.9m in seed funding from Sequoia India and angel investors Teru Sato, Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon in November 2015.
Zilingo operates a mobile online marketplace that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality. The company handles packaging, payment, shipping, order tracking, refunds and cancellations, and also helps merchants price their products.
Merchants can chat to consumers through the app and use an analytics platform to understand how their business is doing. The series A capital will go towards boosting Zilingo’s market share in Thailand and Singapore, and entering new markets including Indonesia.
Ankiti Bose, chief executive and co-founder of Zilingo, said: “We charge our sellers over 10 to 15% commission… and share discounts with them and stopped doing business in verticals where there was no margin to be made.
“It means we reduced our burn and extended our runway while our competitors increasingly ran out of cash.”