Malaysia’s Wedding.com.my gets $274k to empower brides across Southeast Asia

Malaysian online wedding portal Wedding.com.my today announced the raising of MYR 1M (US$274,000) in a seed funding round led by Kathrein Ventures and joined by N Capital Partners and an angel investor. The platform acts as a one-stop shop for brides to find wedding inspiration and vendors, culminating in educated purchases for their big day – crucial in an industry that co-founder Kelvin Leow considers to be a “cutthroat business.”

The founding team, from left to right: Stacey Lee, Kelvin Leow, and Petrina Goh

The investment will be used to “further strengthen its position as category leader in Malaysia.” “Our active members have grown by more than two times in just six months, and our average month-on-month growth is in the double digits,” reveals Petrina Goh, co-founder of Wedding.com.my. The website also receives more than half a million page views per month.

Wedding.com.my monetizes through subscription fees paid by the merchants – pay a premium, and receive leads via their profile page in return. According to Goh, most of the revenue continues to stream in from this channel, though its new “social commerce” component – recommending products and services via members’ social networks – is slowly but surely bringing in the dough after being launched four months ago.

“Wedding.com.my has matched more than 500 quotation requests from their brides – a quotation value of more than MYR 6 million (US$1.6 million) – in less than four months, and their vendors have received more than 10,000 enquiries from their bridal community to date,” adds Charles John Kathrein Jr., co-founder and CEO of Kathrein Ventures.

The influx of cash will also go towards expanding aggressively into Singapore and another Southeast Asian country in 2015. 80 percent of Wedding.com.my’s current member base are Malaysian females, but it recently started making headway into Singapore in January this year under its regional brand name Nuren.sg. “So far it has exceeded expectations […] Based on our initial feedback, we are very excited about the opportunity the Singapore market presents,” says Goh.

As to which country the latter will be, Goh tells Tech in Asia that they are still exploring options, though they have narrowed down the choices to just two so far.

“We will set up a lean localized team for member and merchant acquisitions [in each country], replicating our go-to-market strategy in Malaysia that has proven to be very successful,” she explains, adding that its new investors’ “strong network in the other regions […] especially in Singapore and Thailand” will give them a leg up in acquiring market share overseas.

Kathrein Jr. says he took six months to evaluate and get to know the founding team before taking the plunge:

During those 6 months prior to investing, I never once walked away from a meeting with a feeling that they they lacked the knowledge of the industry, passion, dedication, and “hustle” to become successful. I was also impressed by their willingness to take feedback, and constructive criticism […] The founding team of Wedding.com.my are absolutely the type of founders that we believe will make it through all the ups and downs, and will eventually come out on top.