To provide e-commerce functionality for live sellers, Upmesh raised US $3 M seed funding

Upmesh, a Singapore-based business that provides e-commerce capabilities to live commerce merchants on social media, has raised $3 million in initial funding backed by Indian venture capital firm Leo Capital.

Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Pedisetty (founders of BukuWarung), Royston Tay and Kwok Yang Bin (co-founders of Zopim), and Jonathan Barki (GoTo Financial) were among the participants, as were Beenext, Prasetia Dwidharma Ventures, and iSeed SEA, as well as Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Pedisetty (founders of BukuWarung), Royston Tay and

Upmesh was founded in 2020 by Wong Zi Yang, Soh Jan, Nhat Vu, and Shawn Teow to assist vendors selling real items on Facebook Live with automating order capture and payment collection.

Early last year, the foursome got together to build live streaming interaction tools based on the Twitch API. However, during their research into live streaming in Southeast Asia, they discovered a number of issues that live seller merchants face, such as manually collating orders.

Seeing an opportunity, the quartet set out to build a regional platform with the level of localization required to meet each country’s live-selling culture and expectations.

Upmesh, in its present incarnation, brings together the benefits of e-commerce and social media platforms to provide community and discovery to an otherwise intent-driven online purchasing experience.