Thanks to cross-border e-commerce platforms, China continues to be a major exporter of consumer goods for the world in the online shopping age. It’s not just marketplaces like Amazon and AliExpress that are enabling Chinese businesses to sell abroad. Behind the scene, a group of startups are making the software that allows exporters to more easily figure out what to sell and how to sell.
Dianxiaomi, roughly translated as ‘shop assistant’, is one of these e-commerce SaaS providers. The company just secured $110 million in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund II and Sequoia Capital China. Other prominent investors, including Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital and Huaxing Growth Capital, also participated.
The financing lifts the company’s total investment to $210 million in 2022 alone.
Dianxiaomi is strategically located in Shenzhen, the capital of export-oriented e-commerce activity in China. The city that’s home to Huawei, Tencent and DJI is also known to house the most Amazon sellers in the world.
Dianxiaomi started out with a convenient tool that allowed sellers to list their products already sold on Taobao, Alibaba’s marketplace for Chinese consumers, on Wish with “one click”, said its founder and CEO Du Jianyin, a former R&D engineer at Baidu, in an interview.
From there, Dianxiaomi went on to create a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for Chinese vendors on Wish, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Shopee, Lazada and the like. The target users are small and medium-sized sellers with 5,000 orders per day or less, the company told TechCrunch.
The SaaS provider itself is expanding overseas as well. It’s launched localized ERP products for sellers in Southeast Asia and Latin America, respectively. Globally, it claims to be serving 1.5 million users and has partnered with some 50 e-commerce platforms. In Southeast Asia, it has amassed 430,000 users that are selling within the booming region.
The company plans to open offices in Indonesia, Malaysia and the U.K., where it looks to build a team of 20-100 staff to carry out customer service, operations and other tasks in each country.
Landing in Southeast Asia is an obvious choice for many Chinese entrepreneurs, who see similar opportunities in the region as they did in their home market a decade ago.
“At its rapid growth rate, [Southeast Asia] is a bit like China from 10 years ago. Second, the region is culturally similar with a big ethnically Chinese population, who can help promote the products. And third, orders from Southeast Asia have been growing at over 100% a year,” the CEO noted in the interview.
The financing for Dianxiaomi is one of the few deals that SoftBank has sealed this year in China, which for long was a major destination for the investment powerhouse. But amid a slowing economy and regulatory uncertainties, the company said last year that it would take a more “cautious” approach to backing Chinese startups.
In January, SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China injected funding into a similar venture called Shoplazza, a Canada- and Shenzhen-based company that powers direct-to-consumer brands with online store management tools.
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