Singapore-based online peer-to-peer marketplace Airfrov has an interesting concept. It connects shoppers with travellers to bring unique items home from overseas. The platform offers protection for both, shoppers and travelers, through an escrow payment service, which is supported by seller verification and peer reviews. Now, the startup has successfully secured $500K in a pre‐Series A funding round, to further enhance their product offerings and scale the development teams.
The investment round was led by existing investor, East Ventures, which participated with a a follow‐on investment, along with several new angel investors including Aaron Tan, CEO of Carro. Cai Li, Airfrov’s CEO and Co‐founder, sharing the startup’s upcoming plans to accelerate its growth, said,
We are proud to have built a vibrant community of shoppers who use our app frequently to discover trending products overseas. Our team is working hard on new features to improve the process of buying and bringing unique overseas products for our users at an even faster rate.
Launched in 2015, Airfrov boasts of a growing community of about 45,000 monthly active shoppers and 3,500 travelers actively requesting or helping to purchase unique items overseas respectively. The platform discovers more than 1000 new or unique overseas products every week through shoppers’ requests and travellers’ recommendations.
Airfrov claims at least 1 new request for these products is posted every 2 minutes, and it takes just 3.5 minutes to receive a traveller’s offer when the new requests posted by shoppers are for items from popular countries such as Japan or South Korea. Willson Cuaca, Managing Partner at East Ventures, talking about the company said,
We are impressed with the team’s ambitions and the traction they have achieved to date. Cai Li and his team have built a platform that has a competitive advantage over other marketplaces. We are excited to support the team as they grow their business over the next few years.
East Ventures envisions to bring success to ventures by providing early stage seed capital to promising startups and has invested in more than 150 companies across Asia and the US.
