Singaporean beauty social commerce startup Raena raises $9m in series A round

Singapore-based beauty social commerce startup Raena announced that it has raised US$9 million in its series A round led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Alpha JWC Ventures.

AC Ventures and existing investors Beenext, Beenos, and Strive also participated in this round of funding.

(From left) Raena co-founder and COO Guo Xing Lim, co-founder and CEO Sreejita Deb, and chief commercial officer Widelia Liu / Source: Raena

Founded in 2018, Raena identifies, sources, and aggregates products directly from brands or local manufacturers and then sells them to micro-entrepreneurs online on its full-stack tech platform. It is a shift from what the company used to do, which was creating personal care products with influencers.

“We realized that the problem was twofold: Brands are keen to enter emerging markets such as Indonesia but there are limited distribution partners. On the other hand, [while] platforms such as Shopee, Instagram, and WhatsApp have made it easy to sell to end-consumers, the backend supply chain has not kept up with the needs of these micro-entrepreneurs,” said Guo Xing Lim, co-founder and COO of Raena, in a statement.

The company was co-founded by former Amazon and Google exec Sreejita Deb and Lim, who had worked at Procter & Gamble and Alibaba. They are joined by Widelia Liu, a former Royal Bank of Scotland exec who had founded and grown her own apparel brand before joining Raena.

The funds from this round will be used to expand the company’s team from 15 employees to over 100 people within the next three months.

This latest round of funding comes after the company raised US$1.82 million in a seed round in July 2019.

The company claimed that its monthly revenue has grown over 50x in 2020 and continues to see a double-digit growth month on month.

It also said that it has 1,000 to 1,500 micro-entrepreneurs in Indonesia and Malaysia to whom it distributes products from the more than 50 beauty and health brands on its platform.

“Raena is tapping into a large market that keeps expanding as the middle class grows in Indonesia as well as in Southeast Asia. With the founding team’s expertise and our support, we believe that Raena can grow to become the dominant player in the regional beauty space,” said Chandra Tjan, co-founder and general partner at Alpha JWC Ventures.

The social commerce market in Indonesia is expected to grow to US$25 billion by 2022 according to a McKinsey report.