Vietnamese C2C portal Sendo nets $51m from SoftBank, SBI, and others

The Dragon Bridge in Da Nang, one of the second-tier cities that is Sendo’s main market. / Photo credit: Bui Thuy Dao Nguyen

Major players like SoftBank and SBI Group are betting big on Vietnam’s burgeoning ecommerce market with their latest investment.

Ho Chi Minh City-based Sendo has just landed US$51 million in a series B funding round led by Japanese financial services giant SBI Group.

SoftBank Ventures Korea as well as Beenos and its sister firm Beenext were among the other investors to take part.

Sendo said it will use the funding to improve its eponymous consumer-to-consumer (C2C) portal and launch its new business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplace SenMall.

The capital will also be dedicated to expanding the reach of its mobile wallet and digital payments platform SenPay.

Sendo aims to help individual vendors, micro-entrepreneurs, and small businesses sell their goods online and deliver them cheaply throughout Vietnam. It claims to serve over 300,000 sellers and several million buyers across the country’s 63 provinces.

In particular, Sendo is targeting second-tier metropolitan areas outside of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where it claims that about 74 percent of Vietnam’s 95 million people live.

See: The secret to this fast-growing Vietnamese marketplace’s success: tier-two cities and micro-merchants

The startup said it has hit an annualized gross merchandise volume (GMV) of US$330 million, and it expects to surpass US$1 billion in GMV by 2020.

Research from iPrice found that Sendo held around 11 percent of the Vietnamese ecommerce market last year, while Lazada led the field with a 19 percent share.

Daiwa PI Partners and SKS Ventures came on board as new investors in this series B round. Previous backers eContext Asia and FPT Group also participated.