SoftBank, Sequoia China back this ERP startup that enables China’s online exporters – TechCrunch

Thanks to cross-border e-commerce platforms, China continues to be a major exporter of consumer goods to the world in the age of online shopping. It’s not just marketplaces like Amazon and AliExpress that are allowing Chinese businesses to sell overseas. Behind the scenes, a group of startups are creating software that allows exporters to easily figure out what to sell and how.

Dianxiaomi, roughly translated as ‘shop assistant’, is one of the e-commerce SaaS providers. The company just raised $110 million in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund II and Sequoia Capital China. Other prominent investors, including Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital and Huaxing Growth Capital, also participated.

This funding brings the company’s total investment to $210 million in 2022 alone.

Dianxiaomi is strategically located in Shenzhen, the capital of export-oriented e-commerce in China. The city that is home to Huawei, Tencent and DJI is also known as the place with the most Amazon sellers in the world.

Dianxiaomi started with a nifty tool that allows sellers to list their products for sale on Taobao, Alibaba’s marketplace for Chinese consumers, on Wish with “one click”, speak Its founder and CEO, Du Jianyin, a former R&D engineer at Baidu, in an interview.

From there, Dianxiaomi went on to create a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for Chinese suppliers on Wish, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Shopee, Lazada and the like. Target users are small and medium-sized sellers with 5,000 orders per day or less, the company told TechCrunch.

The SaaS provider itself is also expanding overseas. It has launched localized ERP products for sellers in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Globally, it claims to be serving 1.5 million users and has partnered with around 50 e-commerce platforms. In Southeast Asia, it has already amassed 430,000 selling users in the booming region.

The company plans to open offices in Indonesia, Malaysia and the UK, where it plans to build a team of 20-100 employees to carry out customer service, operations and other tasks in each country. family.

Landing in Southeast Asia is the obvious choice for many Chinese entrepreneurs, who see the same opportunity in the region as they did in their home market a decade ago.

“With rapid growth, [Southeast Asia] a bit like the China of ten years ago. Second, the area is culturally similar to a large Chinese population who can help promote products. And third, orders from Southeast Asia have grown by more than 100% a year,” the CEO noted in the interview.

The funding for Dianxiaomi is one of the few deals SoftBank has signed this year in China, which has long been the main destination of the investment powerhouse. But amid a slowing economy and regulatory uncertainties, the company speak last year that there would be a more “cautious” approach to supporting Chinese startups.

In January, SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China injection sponsorship into a similar venture called Shoplazza, a company based in Canada and Shenzhen that powers direct-to-consumer brands with online store management tools.