Three Singapore Companies To Watch
From Data Analytics To E-commerce; These Local Businesses Are Making Huge Waves In Business
A whole slew of start-ups come and go, but only a rare few actually manage to raise blockbuster funds and scale up to eventually burgeon into household names or even international brands. With that in mind, here are the three major companies well on their way to the pinnacle of success.
Love, Bonito
The homegrown fast fashion e-commerce label has garnered a major cult following and shown tremendous growth trajectory over the years. The company’s founders Viola Tan and Rachel Lim, have turned the initial start up capital of $500 into the multi-million dollar company by leveraging online platforms and social media channels and pioneering new strategies to reach the modern customer. In 2016, the company’s revenue reached approximately S$ 10 million.
Previously importing collections from Bangkok and Korea, the label now reveals around 70 new in-house designs every month, all comfortably tailor-suited to Singapore’s tropical heat. Love, Bonito’s unique selling point and competitive edge has been their ability to carve out a niche in tailoring their clothing lines according to the Asian physique. Over the next three to five years, the company aims to expand across SEA, and eventually Australia, Canada and USA.
RedMart
Founded in 2011, the local online-only grocer, RedMart, was one of the earliest players to enter the online grocery market and has since garnered about US$55.1 million in six rounds of funding as of August last year. Its high-profile investors include the likes of Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
Doing away with the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront, the online store operates out of a 100,000-square foot warehouse with 75 delivery vehicles and about 550 employees, CEO Roger Egan told Tech in Asia late last year. Its inventory are picked and sourced from in-house fulfillment centers then delivered via its RedMart vehicles.
Since last year, it has been acquired by Alibaba-backed ecommerce platform, Lazada, for an undisclosed sum. Egan envisions the partnership with Lazada will “accelerate RedMart’s expansion into new product categories and further enhance its service offering to customers by leveraging Lazada’s seller base, ecosystem of third-party service providers, and advanced technological resources”.
The company hopes to continue riding the growing wave of popularity online grocery shopping, aiming to corner at least 15 per cent of market share in Singapore’s trade market.
Nugit
Founded in 2013, Singapore-based data analytics start-up, Nugit, has developed an app that helps marketers consolidate data collected from digital marketing channels such as Facebook and translating the data into easy-to-read reports. Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the app aggregates and analyses piles of marketing data and deciphers insights worded in human language. Once, a tedious process done solely by data analysts, this automation of the entire process from data extraction to collation and presentation can help marketers focus on campaign planning more effectively, while removing a lot of the grunt work.
In October last year, Nugit raised US$5.2 million (S$7.5 million) from Sequoia India. With the funds, it plans to grow its team of data scientists and engineers to further enhance the product to better serve its client base, which includes Facebook, Johnson & Johnson, Malaysian telco Digi, and advertising firm Publicis. The company is also looking to the regional expansion into Australia and Japan.
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