Jungle, Openspace back Singapore e-commerce services player
Singapore-based e-commerce services provider Amp, which was founded by the team behind inventory and order management platform TradeGecko, has raised USD 18.5m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Jungle Ventures and Openspace Ventures, both historical backers of TradeGecko.
Amp will use the new capital to grow its team and accelerate product development through a combination of organic and inorganic expansion. The company has already acquired three businesses – checkout and customer conversion specialist AppHQ, logistics player Addition, and analytics tool Lifetimely – that are intended to add to its product offering.
The founders are Cameron Priest, who launched TradeGecko in 2012 and served as CEO through its sale to Intuit in 2020, and Patrick Barnes, one of the start-up’s earliest recruits. Barnes left in 2016 to establish Advocately, a business software and services reviews site that was sold to software marketplace G2 in 2019.
TradeGecko supplied cloud-based software to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that helped them manage various accounting and back operations. The company received several rounds of funding from the likes of Golden Gate Ventures, Wavemaker Labs, TNB Ventures, and Aura Group, as well as from Jungle and Openspace.
Priest and Barnes were driven to create Amp in 2022 after seeing hundreds of brands and merchants running around 25 different apps daily to support their e-commerce platforms. The pain points were limited bandwidth and the inability of most apps to work seamlessly. Amp’s proposition is that its interconnected offering can optimise sales, manage shipping, and track analytics.
Amp has grown from zero to 20,000 customers in 18 months. Customers include canned water provider Liquid Death, direct-to-consumer menswear brand True Classic, and water bottle maker Hydro Flask.
“E-commerce share will only continue to grow and the digital contribution to revenue for small businesses is only getting larger. These merchants need solutions which work seamlessly together, so that they can increase efficiency and maximise sales,” said Amit Anand, a founding partner at Jungle, in a statement.
“Amp is both building and acquiring apps to create a compelling suite of services that help power these merchants’ stores in Australia, the US and around the globe.”
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