Arrow, a Singapore-based eCommerce checkout solution announced on 26th April a US$4.8 million seed fundraise led by Sequoia Capital India and supported by Alpha JWC and Guillaume Pousaz’s Zinal Growth, as well as high-profile angel investors such as Ooi Huey Tyng (current board member at AIG and Maxis), Steve Vickers (Chief Operating Officer at Paysend), and Hassan Ahmed (Head of Southeast Asia at Coinbase). The funds will be used to accelerate Arrow’s mission to make it easier for consumers across Southeast Asia to buy online.
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Founded in 2021 by payment specialists Liat Beng Neo and Sebastian Roervig, Arrow’s solution helps merchants navigate Southeast Asia’s highly fragmented payments and sales channel landscape and create fast and frictionless online checkout experiences for consumers across the region.
Arrow offers a seamless mobile checkout for cards and alternate payment methods like e-wallets, bank transfers and buy-now-pay-later, catering to the high propensity of mobile-first shoppers across the region. The checkout-as-a-service solution can be embedded across all digital shopping channels such as social media, chat, digital ads, print media and e-commerce sites.
In just 15 months since the launch, over 100 merchants across fashion, beauty, wellness and home decor are using Arrow and some are already seeing more than 20% increase in conversion rates.
“Our mission is to partner with merchants to create a fast and frictionless checkout experience for consumers regardless of their location or the channel they are buying on,” said Liat Beng Neo, Co-Founder of Arrow. “In 2021, Asia suffered the world’s highest cart abandonment rates with 74 percent of customers in APAC abandoning their carts due to clunky checkout processes. This poses a huge problem, which often goes unaddressed by merchants. We’re here to change the consumer experience and help merchants to increase their revenue by improving the checkout experience instead of only focusing on areas like promo codes and performance marketing.”
“The seed funding raise is the start of a new chapter for Arrow. In support of our mission, we will be looking to grow our team and establish ourselves on the ground in key markets within the SEA region to ensure we are supporting consumers and merchants across this highly nuanced and fragmented region,” said Sebastian Roervig, Co-Founder of Arrow.
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“About $25 to 30 billion of e-commerce GMV in Southeast Asia is transacted on direct-to-consumer brand websites or on social platforms. Unlike on horizontal marketplaces, there is still a high failure rate for payments on these transactions, due to a lack of sophisticated check-out and cart conversion tools. This is the gap that Arrow is solving. The team at Sequoia Capital India are big believers of this thesis, and are excited to back the Arrow team to crack open this large opportunity,” said Aakash Kapoor, Vice President, Sequoia India.