Startup gets powerful new ally to battle SingPost in Asian ecommerce logistics

Photo by groucho

Singapore-based startup Anchanto gained a significant boost in its quest to become Asia’s top ecommerce fulfillment service.

It raised an undisclosed amount of series B funding from Transcosmos, a Japanese business process outsourcing firm running a one-stop ecommerce service. Transcosmos now owns 34.3 percent of the startup.

Anchanto offers three main services to customers. It now helps 380 sellers deliver goods to customers, and another 40 brands to get their products listed on various online marketplaces in the region. It also helps 160 ecommerce stores manage cross-border deliveries.

Instead of purely renting its own warehouse space, Anchanto plugs traditional logistics firms into ecommerce through its software and knowhow. “It’s the Airbnb to SingPost’s Marriott,” said Vaibhav Dabhade, co-founder of Anchanto, in a previous interview.

The partnership means Anchanto gets access to Transcosmos’ customer base of 2,500 brands. It can potentially bring their products into popular online marketplaces in Southeast Asia like Qoo10, Lazada, and Zalora.

The deal increases the startup’s coverage from three countries to eight. “Now Anchanto customers can scale to Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and the US seamlessly.”

Vaibhav claims the partnership makes his company the largest ecommerce fulfillment network in Asia-Pacific, bigger even than SingPost – a logistics and postal delivery firm with a market cap of US$4 billion, dwarfing Transcosmos (which is at US$1 billion).

He rightly points out that SingPost is not a pure ecommerce fulfillment player, which means it’s hard to tease out from public reports exactly how big its ecommerce business is as compared to other types of logistics.

“SingPost’s numbers and geographical coverage are always mixed when reporting figures,” says Vaibhav.

Anchanto processed over 1.27 million inventory units with a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of S$27 million (US$19 million) in the past 18 months.

This seems small given Qoo10’s GMV in 2014 was US$408 million. However, with a boost from Transcosmos’ customer base, the numbers could ramp up quickly.

A SingPost spokesperson, meanwhile, told Tech in Asia that SingPost handles over 15 million orders per year.

Transcosmos is no stranger to investing in Southeast Asian startups. It bought Filipino ecommerce site MetroDeal for US$30 million.