French-Cambodian logistics startup ShopRunBack has raised USD 900,000 in a pre-series A round led by Phnom Penh-based VC fund Obor Capital.
Other investors, such as Singapore’s Negocia Ventures, a VC firm founded by serial entrepreneur Thierry Tea, also participated in the round.
Founded in 2014, ShopRunBack is a reverse logistics company that aims to make domestic and international returns easier by combining an international logistics network with plug-and-play software.
It offers a full software environment to create a global return process integrated into e-commerce sites, as well as a complete platform to set up, monitor, and analyze returns in real-time. The company also provides other services such as quality checking, product grading, consolidation, and intelligent rerouting.
The investment represents an important step in the startup’s development, marking its entry into the Chinese market, said Sophie Meas, the co-founder of ShopRunBack.
The company said it recently signed a strategic partnership with Shenzhen’s 4PX Express, partially owned by Alibaba, to propose the use of its reverse logistics platform on 4PX’s database of more than 300,000 merchants. The collaboration also aims to increase the adoption of logistics and e-commerce best practices in the Mekong region.
“We hope to continue to bring our expertise here and be involved in the development of retail and e-commerce in Cambodia,” said Meas.
In November last year, the startup presented its vision of sustainable reverse logistics at the World Innovations Forum Foundation in Phnom Penh, saying that 17 million returns are made to e-commerce platforms every day. Having already processed some 2 million returns at that time, ShopRunBack said that it saw great potential in Cambodia as a regional hub for logistics.
This article first appeared in Tech in Asia.