Vision Fund leads $150m round for China e-commerce enabler
Shoplazza, a China-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specialising in cross-border e-commerce, has raised USD 150m in the first tranche of Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund II.
New investors include Chimera and Stepstone Group. There were also re-ups from Sky9 Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Qianhai Fund of Funds and Beijing-based family office platform Pantheon Asset.
Shoplazza raised USD 10m in Series B funding from Sky9, Sequoia, Pantheon, and Qianhai Ark Asset Management in 2020. This followed a Series A of the same size from Sky9, Sequoia, and Next Capital two years earlier.
The company was founded in 2017 by a team that spun out from Baidu’s international business division. It maintained bases in Canada and China from the outset. While most Chinese brands sought to expand overseas through centralised platforms like Amazon, Shoplazza focused on online direct-to-customer (DTC) stores.
The company serves more than 360,000 merchants globally, which pay subscription fees of CNY 28 (USD 4) to CNY 218 per month. Services include website and shopping portal development, order management, digital marketing, multi-currency settlement, data dashboards, and membership management.
The closed-loop ecosystem is supported by partnerships with the likes of Meta, Google, PayPal, Klarna, Worldpay, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services. Shoplazza also claims to have worked with more than 500 app developers and service vendors across marketing, payments, logistics and supply chain, and e-commerce enterprise resource (ERP) planning.
The new capital will go towards R&D and recruitment. The company is also keen to cultivate its developer and vendor ecosystem, and grow its merchant base in North America and Europe.
“Shoplazza has built an extensive tech platform for DTC e-commerce. It provides easy-to-use site-building tools and a systematic management platform for global merchants and thereby pushing for the online-offline development of global trade,” said Eric Chen, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
100Summit Partners served as exclusive financial advisor on the deal.
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