Softbaked raises US$420K for its Page365 social media merchant platform

By Digital News Asia December 15, 2014

Seed round from Inspire Ventures and Galaxy Ventures
Offers seller tools to facilitate, automate, book- and retarget their interactions

Softbaked raises US$420K for its Page365 social media merchant platform THAILAND’S Softbaked Co Ltd, owner and operator of social media e-commerce platform Page365, said it has raised US$420,000 in seed-stage funding from Inspire Ventures and Galaxy Ventures.

In a statement, Softbaked said it provides an e-commerce platform for Facebook and social media merchants.

“Based on our scripts that track Facebook and Instagram merchant activities in Thailand, we estimate total value of social media e-commerce transactions to exceed US$510 million this year and will continue to accelerate mostly via manual person-to-person transactions,” founders Lusarun Silpsrikul and Prathan Thananart said in a joint statement.

“Page365 solved this dilemma by bringing merchants onto its platform and offering them a wide range of seller tools to facilitate, automate, book-keep, data analyse, and retarget their interactions and transactions with customers,” they said.

Lusarun is also chief executive officer while Prathan is chief technology officer.

Page365 solves the biggest logistical challenge created by the booming sales on Facebook and other social media outlets by bringing millions of manual transactions each year onto its e-commerce platform, Softbaked said.

To merchants, Page365 offers the ability to automate order processing, select how to engage with customers through a combination of automatic ‘smart responses’ and personalise direct interaction, and to access customer and sales data analytics all from a comprehensive dashboard.

To customers, Page365 creates a more reliable and user-friendly shopping experience, the company claimed.

“The overall e-commerce market in Thailand is growing and social media’s share has kept pace with matched growth,” said Adrian Stewart, a partner at Galaxy Ventures.

“This tells us a lot about the online consumers and the merchants who sell to them. As sales volume increases, Page365’s platform will allow online merchants to easily scale their business and process more orders, while still retaining the informality of shopping that Thai consumers desire,” he added.

“What we see in [Lusarun and Prathan] is a great combination of market savvy and technical talent that has together brought to the market a platform that is solving some of the tough logistical and analytical challenges,” said Tom Kim, a general partner at Inspire Ventures.