Data platform Supermom raises S$18 million in Series B funding led by Granite Asia
The new funds will be used to invest in AI capabilities and expand globally
CONSUMER data platform Supermom raised an S$18 million Series B round led by Granite Asia, with Hearst Ventures and returning investors Qualgro and AC Ventures participating.
This round of funding follows an S$8 million Series A round in December 2022, led by Qualgro.
Supermom was originally an events business, organising expo events with products and services targeting parents, before pivoting to a data platform during the pandemic.
The push to become one happened after co-founder and chief executive Luke Lim came onboard in 2015. Initially an investor, Lim convinced co-founder Joan Ong to change the business into a platform model.
Settling on becoming a data platform came after trying out different models such as e-commerce, which was a success during the pandemic. The numbers and money coming in was tempting, but Lim knew that Supermom could not compete with the incumbents Shopee and Lazada in the long run.
“We landed on a model that is differentiated and with less competition,” he told The Business Times.
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Instead, Supermom would tap its userbase, which comprises both parents and communities, such as various chat groups that the parents are in. Currently, the company has about 10 million parents across 6,000 networking groups, and has identified key opinion leaders – or key opinion moms (KOMs), as Lim puts it.
Supermom offers anonymised zero-party data – data a customer intentionally shares with a brand – of its customer base to brands. Users on the platform can get free samples or trials of baby products in exchange for reviews and insights that brands need.
“When we add up all these numbers together, we have over 1.5 billion of social connections that overlap, but imagine the velocity if we activate the KOMs – that is 1.5 billion times the brand or content is being mentioned,” said Lim.
New funding
The new funds will be used to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and expand internationally. AI will be utilised to analyse data and provide insights for both brands and users. This includes aiding in generating content by Supermom’s users, as well as accurately profiling users to serve them more targeted brand activations, allowing users to earn more.
KOMs will also be more accurately identified via a graph system that the AI would analyse, boosting the effectiveness and productivity of Supermom to brands. This would help to build a predictive engine for brands to effectively reach out to consumers.
More than 200 brands such as AIA and Unilever work with Supermom, but Lim said that users also help select companies to work with, citing its yearly brand awards voted by users. These brands range from baby to preschool, skincare, healthcare, wellness and anything a mother might need.
“We’re here to serve brands. We are a neutral data platform to connect to parents directly,” he added.
The company is now in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and entered Vietnam in 2023. The funding will also be used to grow the team from more than 100 currently to about 150 across the region, tapping the growing parent market that has a booming young demographic.
“We plan to triple our engagements and grow our user base, deepening our tech and making it more robust and efficient, and realise this in the next 12 months,” said Lim.
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