E-com & fulfilment technology startup Anchanto raises Series A round from Innosight Ventures, Cub Capital, others

Singapore- and Pune-based Anchanto, a startup that provides an e-commerce and fulfilment technology platform (on the lines of Fulfilment by Amazon), has raised an undisclosed amount in its Series A round of funding led by Singapore-based early stage investor Innosight Ventures. Other investors that also participated in the round included Cub Capital, Scott Anthony and Akshay Mehra.

The funds will used for Anchanto's Singapore capacity expansion by eight times to meet existing and new customer requirements. The Singapore set-up will be expanded to 74,000 cubic feet of ready to pick and pack inventory racking system, and 4,000 orders per day picking, packing and delivery in the country. The funds will also be invested in the company's propriety technology platform, and for setting up its fulfilment operations in countries like Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Indonesia (Jakarta) and India (Bangalore).

As part of the investment, Piyush Chaplot, partner at Innosight Ventures, will join the company's board, while Michael Blakey, founder and partner at Cub Capital, will join as an advisor.

"Anchanto's proprietary technology solves real pain points of online businesses, and we are excited to be working together to create a regional market leader. The startup is a great example of the type of founder-led, capital efficient businesses that we like to invest in," said Blakey.

"Anchanto has a disruptive logistics technology platform which makes it extremely easy for the growing number of pure play e-commerce businesses, brands and retailers to scale their business in the fast growing Asia region," added Chaplot.

The startup was founded by the trio of Vaibhav Dabhade (CEO), Abhimanyu Kashikar (CTO), and Shafique Muhammad (principal solutions architect) in 2011. It helps businesses, brands and retailers build enterprise grade web stores. Anchanto also provides a fulfilment technology platform coupled with inventory warehousing, picking, packing and delivery (both forward as well as reverse logistics) in Southeast Asia.

Pure play online businesses, retailers and brands can pick and choose different modules of the company's technology. They can either get the full 360-degree platform including the web store, or use only 'Fulfillment by Anchanto' (FBA) for managing inventory and processing orders. A web store built on non-Anchanto technology can easily integrate with FBA with a single API or plug-in to offload all fulfilment operations to Anchanto. The current dedicated technology team size is 18. It aims to be the 'Fulfillment by Amazon' of Southeast Asia region.

The startups' customers include Crème Simon, Cluster-Cluster, Wine Connection, Robinsons and Pomelo Fashion, among others.

"Innosight Ventures has a proven focus on disruptive innovation, and Blakey has previously invested in and advised ByBox, a leading e-commerce fulfilment technology platform in Europe; hence they are the ideal partners as we scale Anchanto in the region," said Dabhade. "We are happy to have investors on board that provide us not only with capital, but also innovation and strategic experience in our domain," he said.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)