ShopSpot Raises Angel Funding

ShopSpot, which was covered by my colleague Vanessa last week, has received seed funding from a group of angels and business entrepreneurs in Thailand, led by Kris Nalamlieng for an undisclosed sum. If you haven’t heard about ShopSpot, it is basically a mobile app marketplace for buyers and sellers to snap a pic, put in a description, and buy or sell via the app. It was launched for Thailand and Singapore in the iTunes store on April 18 and has seen about 1,500 downloads so far.

The founders originate from Thailand but joined Singapore-based Joyful Frog Digital Incubator’s (JFDI) 100-day accelerator program after winning second place at Startup Weekend Bangkok 2011. Natsakon Kiatsuranon, the co-founder and CEO of ShopSpot, said in a statement this afternoon:

The cash element of this investment will allow us to focus on shaping the great user experience that will make ShopSpot a leading force in mobile commerce worldwide. But this investment is more than cash. Our ambition is to do for mobile commerce what Instagram has done for photo-sharing and what Twitter did with microblogging. We’re at the start of a long journey and we know that the experience, contacts, and advice that our new investors can bring will prove invaluable.

We also learned that ShopSpot has plans to launch an Android app over the next two months and wants to expand to Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines over the next two quarters. The move to Android would make sense given these targeted markets. Though those regions are still pretty much feature-phone dominated, especially in Indonesia, so this might prove to be a challenge.

ShopSpot is the second startup from JFDI’s new program which has raised funding. The first was Kark which received investment from Indonesia-based VC Ideosource just last week. JFDI surely knows how to drum up the PR hype as its demo day draws closer, which will happen this coming Friday on May 4 in Singapore.