Vietnam e-commerce player Sendo gets $51m Series B
Sen Do Technology (Sendo), a Vietnamese e-commerce company that operates a C2C platform and payment service, has secured $51 million in Series B funding led by Japan’s SBI Group.
Additional participants included Softbank Ventures Korea, Daiwa PI Partners, SKS Ventures, and local investor FPT Group, as well as eContext Asia, Beenos, and Beenext, a firm that spun out from Singapore's Gordian Capital last year. The capital will be used to expand existing operations and launch a B2C marketplace to be known as SenMall.
Sendo claims to be Vietnam's leading C2C marketplace with more than 10 million products. The company says it serves more than 300,000 sellers and "millions" of buyers in all of the country's 63 provinces. According to co-founder Nguyen Dac Viet Dung, annualized gross merchandise volume has achieved a value of $330 million and is on track to surpass $1 billion in 2020.
Payment services are provided by a mobile wallet known as SenPay, which is said to be operable both on the Sendo platform as well as offline. SenPay is managed by FPT Wallet, a joint venture between Sendo and FPT. Sendo is said to be the first operator of its kind in Vietnam to guarantee online transactions through direct connections with banks.
"Vietnam is at its inflection point, bolstered by rapid GDP growth, young population and willingness to adopt technology," Daniel Kang, a partner and managing director at SoftBank Ventures Korea, said in a statement. "Against this backdrop, Vietnam's e-commerce has strong growth potential and we believe Sendo's marketplace model will benefit from this environment the most."
SBI positions itself as a pioneer in online financial services and claimed earlier this year to have invested some $290 million across more than 60 technology companies in the sector. Previous activity in Vietnam includes the establishment of a $100 million fund alongside FPT with a view to privatizing state-owned banking and finance companies as well as incubating technology start-ups in various fields.
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