SariSuki, a community group buying startup for daily essentials and groceries in the Philippines, announced on 2nd March that the company has raised US$7.1 million in a new funding round, bringing its total funding to US$10.5 million.
The latest funding round was joined by Openspace, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Global Founders Capital (GFC), Saison Capital, JG Digital Equity Ventures, and Foxmont Capital Partners according to the statement.
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This significant funding will enable SariSuki to expand into quick commerce with a vision to build an end-to-end eGrocery platform in the Philippines. With the launch of this new service, SariSuki will be able to create greater value for producers at source as well as hyper-convenience for consumers.
The Philippines’ e-commerce market size is estimated to reach USD$15 billion by 2025 (Statista) but despite this huge market size, the adoption of e-commerce into the grocery sector remains low, with only 3 percent of businesses operating online. With the pandemic further exposing this issue, SariSuki started in 2021 with a mission to empower communities with more options to shop for high quality groceries online – which it achieves by buying fresh produce in bulk from local farmers and offering them to the local community at a discounted price. The company was founded by a team emerging from within Southeast Asia’s scale-up tech giants including Brian Cu, who was a co-founder of Zalora Philippines and Grab Philippines.
The platform is now entering quick commerce on the back of 36x growth in the past nine months. The business has served more than 60,000 consumers and grown the team to over 100 employees. SariSuki’s quick commerce app commits to delivering high-quality produce in under 15 minutes within its coverage areas.
“We are a set of founders that grew up in the Philippines and have an understanding of our market. This, combined with our background in scaling up large tech companies in the region, made us realize that we can do more with the supply chain infrastructure we have built. Quick commerce is a way for us to expand into serving the segment of our market that seeks hyper-convenience for a hyper-local product mix for their daily needs,” said Brian Cu, Co-Founder of SariSuki.
To address supply chain inefficiencies, SariSuki adopts an agent-assisted model, servicing its consumers through Community Leaders.Members of communities who set up their business as a Community Leader see meaningful income expansion as they profit from selling produce whilst performing the last mile fulfillment. This model has enabled SariSuki to offer supermarket quality products at wet market prices.
“SariSuki’s increasing sector dominance has resulted from addressing key pain points and barriers to e-commerce adoption with a model that builds confidence amongst, and value for, consumers. We recognised that the trust that those communities are putting in their Community Leader, who consistently delivers high-quality local produce, will help to rapidly accelerate vital e-commerce adoption,” said Hian Goh, co-founder of Openspace.
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“We are honored to back a stellar team bringing convenience and a world-class customer experience to groceries shopping in the Philippines. In our view, the high density, growing disposable income, maturing digital connectivity and sheer population size in key urban areas in the Philippines, finally set the stage for the next cohort of large consumer-facing tech businesses in the country,” concluded Tito Costa, Partner at Global Founders Capital.