Belazee, a ‘conversational commerce’ startup, raises more money

Belazee wants to bring the human touch to ecommerce via a chat interface.

Digital assistant apps. Digital concierges. Conversational commerce. Whatever you want to call it, 2016 could be a year this trend takes off in a big way.

One startup in this space got funded today: Malaysia’s Belazee announced closing a pre-series A round co-led by Japanese mobile gaming company DeNA and American investment firm Fenox Venture Capital. Rimu Group, a new startup incubator, joined the round. The exact financial details have been kept under wraps.

The firm started out as an SMS-only service where you can get any request fulfilled – exactly like Magic, a Silicon Valley startup which raised US$12 million from Sequoia. But since then, it has evolved into a “conversational commerce platform,” complete with an ecommerce store and infrastructure.

So what exactly is conversational commerce? Well, we prefer to call it “chat commerce”, and you can think of it as ecommerce you can talk to. In other words, instead of clicking around to buy an item from an online shop, you chat with it to get the product to your doorstep. It’s exactly what China’s WeChat has become, and Facebook is just turning into.

In Malaysia, Belazee (called Bemalas in the country) offers the chat-to-buy option to users via SMS, the web, and Facebook. If you prefer clicking around, the company offers that too. Belazee also has something called Works, a subscription service for businesses to outsource their ecommerce to the startup.

The company has expanded to Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, and Australia, though it doesn’t seem like its full slate of services are available in those countries.

No magic

Belazee seems to be growing quickly. It’s handling 30,000 requests monthly right now, up from 20,000 almost two months ago. About 60 percent of that gets converted to sales. It’s now working to release a mobile app regionally by the first quarter of 2016.

In Southeast Asia, there have been many attempts to replicate the Magic model, though it looks like they might’ve jumped the gun. My attempt to book a couple of Star Wars tickets through such services were unsuccessful. It’s hard to see how to make this business model work without overcoming serious technical hurdles.

Even Magic has pivoted. It recently began charging users US$100 an hour, moving from a mass market product to a niche service for people who have too much money and little time on their hands.

Belazee realized early on that such a model wouldn’t work in Asia, and it has been working behind the scenes to transform itself. Its prescience appears to be paying off.