SPH Media Fund leads US$3m pre-Series A funding of Snapcart

Singapore

THE investment arm of Singapore Press Holdings, SPH Media Fund, along with Vickers Venture Partners and Wavemaker Partners, has led a US$3 million follow-on pre-Series A funding round into Jakarta-based cashback platform Snapcart.

The new money will help the B2B (business-to-business) startup expand its sales team, and improve its analytics technological capabilities in optical character recognition, machine learning and data sciences.

Snapcart is a mobile app that gives rewards and cashbacks to shoppers when they snap a photo of their grocery receipts, which it will then analyse in real-time to generate purchase data and insights for brands.

This latest funding comes after Snapcart's first fund-raising of US$1.7 million in January last year, and completes its pre-Series A funding round. Investors then included Wavemakers, SPH Media Fund and Ardent Capital.

Reynazran Royono, founder and chief executive of Snapcart, said: "We believe we are disrupting the way market research is traditionally done, especially in the brick-and-mortar stores which contribute over 95 per cent of total grocery sales."

Key products by Snapcart include CART, a real-time purchase behaviour analytics solution; TASQ, a behaviour-based survey and questionnaire tool; and OPTI, a platform which measures offline media attribution.

These products are said to provide brands with a way to measure returns from media investments based on actual purchases - and not just views, impressions or click-through rates.

Snapcart currently operates out of Jakarta. It expanded to the Philippines last August, where it is seeking to amass 50,000 monthly active users, as it did in Indonesia.

Terence Sim, associate director at Vickers Venture Partners, said that Snapcart has built a solution for "an industry that has long been used to traditional methods".

Mr Royono added: " We are confident that with the successful completion of this fund, we are on the right path."