Today Singapore-based TradeGecko, a cloud-based inventory and order management platform for SMBs, announced today that it has closed $650,000 in a seed round funding led by WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures and others. BetaKit covered the company earlier in the year when it launched in private beta; now in public beta, it is currently working with over 200 wholesalers, distributors, and importers to get feedback, with roughly a quarter who have now been transitioned to paying accounts. That’s up from the 50 wholesalers they were working with as of August, when the company was still in private beta.
Co-founder and CMO Carl Thompson spoke with BetaKit about the company’s plans for the funding. He said the money would be primarily used to add developers and marketing talent to the team, and Thompson said they’ve been struggling to find talented new hires. “The one thing Singapore has going for it is that it has tons of money, it’s not that hard to get funding, they have grants for just about everything. The only problem is there’s not huge amounts of talent here,” Thompson added.
The company’s dashboard provides a live activity feed and lets wholesalers and other customers track their inventory, fulfill orders, and access customer and sales data through CRM features like adding notes to specific customers and accessing their full history with a particular retailer. It will also be launching TradeGecko Intelligence features, which will allow users of the platform to further drill down into analytics.
The team has yet to finalize pricing for the platform, but Thompson noted that there will be three paid tiers (with no free accounts), and that they will primarily target SMBs that have anywhere from 5-50 employees. The pricing as of this summer was $39 for an annual account, so no word on whether that will be one of the new tiers. The focus on mid-sized companies is something that the company believes will set it apart from companies like Stitch Labs, which caters to independent clothing designers, and solutions for larger enterprises like NetSuite and SAP. The other key area where the company hopes to stand out is in its workflow automation, which it hopes will allow SMB owners to focus on the core of running their business, rather than the administrative aspect.
The company doesn’t want to focus exclusively on inventory management, but instead wants to be an end-to-end solution for its target user market. To do so TradeGecko will be releasing its API in 2013 to help third-party developers build apps on top of its platform, and it will look to integrate with existing solutions. It is already integrated with Shopify’s ecommerce platform, is currently in talks with Salesforce and will be launching its integration with Xero, a cloud accounting software provider, in 2013.
“For us inventory management is the core part, but its the end-to-end solution, streamlining the entire backend that we’re interested in,” Thompson added.