Singapore's ShopBack secures $80m Series F extension
Temasek Holdings-controlled investor 65 Equity Partners has led a USD 80m equity investment in Singaporean retail platform ShopBack, extending a Series F round in June.
Local growth-stage investor Asia Partners led the initial Series F investment - also of USD 80m - with support from January Capital. Temasek has previously participated in two rounds worth USD 75m and USD 40m in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Total funding since ShopBack's inception in 2014 now stands at USD 310m.
65 Equity was set up last year to support high-growth Singaporean companies with valuations of USD 1bn to USD 5bn and regional or global expansion ambitions. It manages a SGD 1bn (USD 700m) fund and typically makes deployments in a range of USD 100m to USD 200m.
“This investment aligns strategically with our mandate of supporting high-growth businesses led by founders and entrepreneurs in their continued business development, as well as facilitating their potential listings on the Singapore Exchange,” 65 Equity CEO Tan Chong Lee said in a statement.
Asia Partners’ key value-add promise to portfolio companies is to support US public listings. The firm is led by Nick Nash, formerly president of Sea, which achieved Singapore’s first major consumer tech IPO in the US in 2017.
ShopBack promotes products – travel, fashion, health, beauty, food, and general merchandise – on behalf of retailers, receiving a commission on each sale. A portion of these commissions is wound back into the business in the form of discounts for end-users. It has more than 10,000 partner merchants, including Alibaba Group’s Taobao and Lazada platforms, Expedia, and Zalora.
The company helps around 1m consumers a day discover deals, compared products, get rewards, and make payments, facilitating more than USD 3.5bn in sales annually, mostly in Southeast Asia. The user base currently amounts to about 35m across ten markets, compared to 19m in seven markets in early 2020.
Recent traction includes several additions to leadership such as a new chief technology officer, formerly of messaging giant Slack and a commercial managing director, who was previously chief revenue officer at Zalora. The new global accounts managing director previously headed commercial leadership roles at Agoda and eBay.
Previous investors include Rakuten Capital, EV Growth, Cornerstone Ventures, 33 Capital, EDBI, East Ventures, SoftBank Venture Asia, Blue Sky Private Equity, Aetius Capital, AppWorks Ventures, Qualgro Partners, and SingTel Innov8. The first institutional backer was Singapore’s Accel-X, which provided USD 500,000 in 2014.
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