East Ventures Leads Series B Funding in RPG Commerce

East Ventures led a series B funding round of $29 million or approximately 431 billion Rupiah to Commerce RPG. In addition to East Ventures, this round was also led by UOB Venture Management, Vertex Ventures SEA & India (VVSEAI), and RHL Ventures.

In his official statement, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures Willson Cuaca said RPG Commerce is unique in that it takes an approach that caters to a wide variety of categories, brands, and services Model Roll-up in sector E-commerce.

According to him, this is an important strategy for D2C businesses to have international appeal to ensure their success in the market. "RPG Commerce has been able to grow a loyal customer base in the United States, Canada, and Europe, through quality products and innovation in Indonesia supply chain leaders," said Willson.

RPG Commerce Co-founder & CEO Melvin CHee said that he would increase the brand portfolio and the number of HR, encourage R&D innovation, to M&A with this additional funding. "We want to rapidly add to our talent and leverage technology capabilities to expand our consumer landscape," said Melvin.

For your information, RPG Commerce is a startup social commerce based D2C from Malaysia. RPG offers brand products in-house in the category of daily necessities, clothing to household. Currently, RPG partners with more than ten brands, including Thousand Miles, Bottom Labs, Eubi, Montigo, and Cosmic Cookware.

RPG manages various brands from product launch, operations, to optimization supported by production and delivery online end-to-end. According to the company, technology-enabled RPGs Back-end sophisticated technology and a visionary creative team capable of rapid brand portfolio expansion and customer growth of up to 300% over the past year.

With the spirit of supporting independent businesses with on-demand products, he hopes to empower small business owners through incubation and acquisition programs to serve consumers in various verticals.

Investment climate and potential social commerce

In an interview with DailySocial.id recently, Willson Cuaca provides some interesting notes related to the investment climate. Despite the negative sentiment in the Indonesian startup ecosystem, he believes that this does not change his position in finding potential startups.

According to him, there are still many startups that have good fundamentals. "Stay calm and alert in dealing with this situation. Seek support from your investors, be more prudent in spending, and don't do fundraising when your company needs money," Willson advises the founders.

In context social commerce in Indonesia, these models include those that show great future growth potential. Bain & Co data records transactions from social commerce contributed $12 billion to the total GMV of e-commerce in the country of $47 billion in 2020.

Besides, the trend social commerce continues to grow considering that rural communities still have limited access to meeting their needs through online platforms compared to people who live in urban areas.

By empowering the distribution network model or reseller, social commercee can open access to products and wider job opportunities.