South East Asia’s and India’s review authority TrustedCompany, has raised $1M Series A round to expand in emerging markets and expand into Africa and Brazil.
The round was led by German TENGELMANN ventures and co-invested by 500 Startups and Asia Venture Group (AVG), just ten months after the initial seed investment from AVG.
TrustedCompany.com Co-Founder and Managing Director Frederik Krass said the firm will use the financing to continue expanding its presence as review platform in SEA and India, accelerate product innovation, grow sales and marketing resources across the region and start into Africa and Brazil.
“We have seen great adaptation to write and use reviews in the markets, but will further increase our efforts in educating consumers about the power of online reviews”, Knuth, Co-Founder and MD, adds. TrustedCompany.com aims to become the leading consumer review platform for online consumers in emerging markets. “We want to increase the transparency in the market and help consumers differentiate between the good merchants and the bad merchants. This also helps good merchant to differentiate themselves and is a powerful word-of-mouth marketing tool, increasing revenues for online businesses” states Knuth.
The Hong Kong and Malaysia based firm serves clients such as Lenskart in India, iMoney.my or myiMart in Malaysia, Pricearea in Indonesia or Printi and HTS Latarias in Brazil.
TrustedCompany.com is an open, review-driven community that connects consumers to their counterparts to help them benefit from authentic customer reviews and make sure they know about a company’s reliability before they purchase a new computer, book, their next holiday, or take out an insurance among others. This raise will help TrustedCompany.com do reviews for the everyone on the internet.
“There’s nothing more exciting than seeing a team this capable go after a market opportunity this huge”, said Khailee Ng from 500 Startups. “Amazon, Trip Advisor, Agoda, eBay, Yelp… Some of the most prevalent internet companies of our time were built on providing reviews to online shoppers.”
TENGELMANN ventures will help the firm execute its vision even more rapidly and globally.