Thailand’s Blisby nets $300K to bring its online handicrafts marketplace to the region

Apart from cheap shopping and sandy beaches, Thailand is also known for its community of artisans who make lovely traditional art and handicraft items. Blisby, an online marketplace that wants to connect these Thai craftspeople with the modern world, today announced the raising of US$300,000 in a funding round led by East Ventures (disclosure: East Ventures is an investor in Tech in Asia. See our ethics page for more information) and DeNA, with 500 Startups’ two Asia-centric funds 500 Tuk Tuks and 500 Durians joining in.

Like Etsy, which is now looking to go public and raise roughly US$300 million, Blisby users can buy and sell their handmade items directly on its website. The difference, naturally, is that the latter is highly localized – the entire website is in Thai.

The fresh infusion of cash will be used to expand into neighboring countries –  Indonesia and Malaysia specifically – as well as building new features and promoting Blisby sellers and their products. In March, it had 350,000 monthly active users making over 1 million monthly pageviews, with a month-on-month growth rate of 20 percent. Extremely decent numbers, given that the platform launched just four months ago. Founder Phuvadol Thongthavorn, however, declined to reveal Blisby’s gross merchandise volume.

Blisby’s founder Phuvadol Thongthavorn gives the thumbs up.

Thongthavorn admits that he was surprised at the amount of user engagement happening on the ecommerce platform. “You can see it with the number of shares and conversations on our properties […] When you have word-of-mouth and conversations happening, it’s a sign that you are providing something of value,” he says.

Several hundreds of users have written in to thank the Blisby team, saying that “Thailand has needed something like this for so long.” Such gestures, coupled with good traction, have gone a long way in confirming Thongthavorn’s initial observation that the “strong uprising of contemporary Thai artists on top of the already rich cultural arts” would lead to increasing demand for a community “where old and new ideas intersect.”

“In fact, when I first started hiring employees, I saw that there were more art graduates than computer and engineering graduates,” he says. “I thought if I could build this online community and equip them with the right tools, I can step aside and the community would nurture itself.”

The Blisby team hard at work.

With these numbers in hand, getting such a stellar line-up of investors onboard was a piece of cake. “James Riney from DeNA was the first person to call me, and within three days he brought in the rest of the investors,” Thongthavorn recalls. “Willson from East Ventures followed up, and within three days sent me a termsheet. Both were really fast and fair, and they put an importance on getting things done quickly so that I can get back to focusing on the company.”

“The model is obviously not a new one, but what stood out about Blisby was the CEO. When I invest in a company, I like to ask myself whether I would want to work for the founder. In Phuvadol’s case, the answer was yes, definitely,” says James Riney, principal at DeNA’s venture capital arm.

The cherry on the cake was Blisby’s acceptance into the Google Developers Startup Launch program in February, which saw it receiving US$100,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits and mentoring as well. Thongthavorn sees it as validation that they are on the right track.