Sales conversions startup SalesCandy gets pre-series A funding

SalesCandy, which helps businesses speed up their sales conversions, has secured its first round of venture capital funding. The US$650,000 pre-series A investment consists of half a million from Singapore’s Wavemaker Partners, plus US$150,000 from a bunch of angel investors, the Kuala Lumpur-headquartered startup revealed to Tech in Asia today.

The two-year-old company is active in Malaysia and the Philippines – its biggest markets – as well as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Photo credit: JJ Ying / Unsplash

SalesCandy’s service, which enterprises pay for their staff to use, hooks up salespeople with potential customers who have just registered their interest – similar to how Uber connects commuters with available drivers. Here’s our in-depth profile of the startup from May:

See: App for sales reps supercharges selling

New industries

Rather than using the funding to expand geographically, the company will spend it honing the service so that it suits sales personnel in more and more industries, says CEO and co-founder Stanley Chee.

SalesCandy is adapting the service for insurance and banking as it branches out from the real estate industry – a lucrative niche for the startup in its early days.

Stanley Chee / Photo credit: SalesCandy

“[Banks] have lots of branches – we’re talking about hundreds of branches,” Chee points out. And each branch has lots of sales leads for people interested in a large variety of products. That’s a complex problem to solve: ensuring that the centralized sales team gets all the right leads and follows up on them quickly.

What this means is that SalesCandy wants to augment its lead management system – as it’s called in the marketing world – so that it’s efficient across a wide range of enterprise use cases where folks who express an interest in a product – whether it’s a car loan ad on Facebook that you clicked, a mortgage you inquired about while at the bank, or the hotline for a new condo development that you called up.

SalesCandy’s available stats:

• Launched August 2017
• 27 employees
• Not yet profitable
• Aiming to grow monthly recurring revenue threefold in the next 12 months
• 30 clients with close to 1,000 sales staffers

While the number of active users is up from 600 back in May, the number of clients is unchanged.

Crowdfunding cash