Mobile marketplace Duriana raises $2.5M from Japanese investor Beenos

Duriana, a mobile app that lets users buy and sell with fellow consumers, announced the raising of a US$2.5 million round led by Beenos, a Japanese investment firm with an ecommerce business. Existing investors also joined the round. The startup raised US$3.5 million to date.

The funding gives the company a runway to enhance its product discovery feature and integrate payments and logistics capabilities, says Duriana CEO and co-founder Amanda Ernst. She adds that the app lists 600,000 products and presides over a few thousand transactions a week.

This fundraising round is noteworthy because it’s apparently playing second fiddle to Carousell, probably the leading peer-to-peer mobile marketplace in Southeast Asia. It launched in 2012 and, last heard, listed eight million items and saw two million transactions sice inception – eight a minute.

Duriana’s most recent round is much less than Carousell’s, which raised US$6 million from a syndicate that includes Sequoia Capital, and it’s unclear how they stack up in terms of valuation. But going by other proxy measures on Techlist, Carousell appears to be leading in terms of the number of iOS and Android app reviews.

Perhaps Beenos believes there’s enough room in Southeast Asia for Duriana to co-exist with Carousell, and if ecommerce in Southeast Asia continues its blistering growth, there might be. While both apps are competing in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, only Duriana is staking its future on the Philippines. Despite the seemingly smaller overall numbers, Ernst claims it is leading the Philipine and Malaysian markets.

“What we do know is that in Malaysia over the past few months Duriana has more new registered users monthly than Carousell. In Philippines it is easy to tell from the app that we are ahead by both user and listings,” she tells Tech in Asia.

It plans to differentiate from the competition by helping users “transact simply and safely.” That was why they added an escrow payment system recently.

Duriana is available on iOS and Android.