Goxip Raises US$ 1,62 million to Expand Business in Southeast Asia

Ilustrasi (dok)

Hong Kong (IndoTelko) -  Goxip, the mobile-first shopping and discovery app, has announced that it has raised US$ 1,62 million in one of the largest seed rounds in Southeast Asia.

The round is led by Chryseis Tan, daughter of Vincent Tan, the founder of Malaysian conglomerate Berjaya Group, which controls a variety of businesses in Malaysia including Starbucks, 7/11, Borders Book Store and Times Square.

The other major investor is Ardent Capital, which has a track-record of investing in successful ecommerce companies such as aCommerce, Orami, Bizzy , and Snapcart.

Goxip consists of two main parts which Shopping and discovery and  Fashion fulfillment. Fashion discovery is enabled through celebrity style feeds and user generated content called “snaps” uploaded to the app’s image recognition technology that scans and recommends similar products from over 2 million items that can be purchased worldwide.

Fulfillment is carried out through Goxip’s affiliate partners’ third-party websites, which in total offers over 15,000 designer brands including  NET-A-PORTER, Topshop, Nordstrom, Shopbop etc.

Goxip will use the funding to continually enhance the core product proposition - a shoppable Instagram app, release the iOS version and hire talent aggressively. The team is optimizing the existing ecommerce Goxip website and android app while preparing for implementation of a marketplace to their growing platform.

Malaysia and Hong Kong are early frontrunners for market entry in Q2 and Q3 of 2016 where Goxip plans to acquire over 1 million users by the end of the year.

Browsing behavior or ‘fashion discovery’ is currently limited by low product and brand selection like Zalora  or through sites like iprice.my, an ecommerce aggregator that operates off an affiliate model.

“Both models are still very “search-centric”, which works fine for commodities like electronics but are not ideal for fashion,” says Juliette Gimenez, co-founder and CEO of Goxip. “If I’m scrolling through Instagram and want to purchase a shirt on an obscure Thai celebrity, I would have no clue how to find it. The journey from fashion inspiration to check-out is incredibly common but no one has offered a viable solution.”

The Goxip marketplace will be open to well-known ecommerce shops and Instagram boutiques to cultivate Southeast Asia’s insufficient C2C space.

The platform disrupts traditional shopping by enabling both merchants and users to mix and match from a large variety of brands, share tips with a global community of stylists and personalize the entire shopping experience.

“The fashion ecommerce space has yet to be disrupted. We want to give C2C merchants another mobile channel to distribute their products because currently most transactions are done on media platforms such as Line, Facebook and Instagram which inherently struggle with a broken fashion discovery process built on search. The double-digit growth of Internet and online shopper penetration proves the market is ready for a new and improved fashion experience.” said Goxip Co-Founder and CEO Juliette Gimenez. “There are always new street stalls selling clothes online and offline. The beauty of Southeast Asia is everyone can become an entrepreneur and Goxip wants to be a part of growing the community.”

“Southeast Asia exhibits one of the highest social media penetration rates and consumers who are statistically shown to be more heavily influenced by celebrity-driven pop cultures than Western markets It’s a demographic ready for an app like Goxip.” said Chryseis Tan, a scion of Malaysia’s Berjaya Group’s billion dollar Tan family and a prominent consumer tech angel investor.(es)