The Malaysia-based iPrice Group has secured $5 million from Japan’s Itochu Corporation and the KDDI Open Innovation Fund III to develop a pricing comparison platform across Southeast Asia (operated by Global Brain Corporation).
With the additional capital, iPrice plans to extend its lending services by assisting users in finding the finest e-commerce offers and consumer loans to pay their purchases.
The iPrice Group works under the iPrice brand and through agreements with applications such as SmartPay (Vietnam), GoRewards (Philippines), Home Credit (Indonesia), Visense (Singapore), Robinsons Rewards (Philippines), and Boost (Philippines) (Malaysia). It also has a web presence in Hong Kong.
The Kuala Lumpur-based company recently launched a Price Watch feature that allows Indonesian consumers to receive alerts when the price of their favourite items reduces straight on the iPrice App. Throughout 2022, the service will be available in Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.
According to iPrice, it evaluates and catalogues over 7 billion e-commerce offers from more than 8 million suppliers, drawing more than 130 million unique consumers in the region by 2021. LINE Ventures, LINE Corporation’s corporate venture arm, led an undisclosed sum in further fundraising for iPrice Group in May 2018. It announced a cooperation to introduce LINE SHOPPING in Indonesia a year later.
According to a survey by Facebook and Bain & Company, the number of platforms utilised by SEA digital consumers has progressively increased to 7.9 websites per user on average in 2021, approximately 52 percent more than in 2020. According to a Google estimate, due to the present acceleration in Southeast Asia, digital lending will reach $92 billion in transactions by 2025.
Itochu, the company’s new investor, has extensive lending expertise, and its subsidiary PT ITC Auto Multi Finance runs a lending operation in Indonesia under the Payku name. Home Credit (Indonesia), Julo (Indonesia), Cashalo (Philippines), Smartpay (Vietnam), and ZIP are among iPrice’s other lending partners (Singapore, launching in H1 2022).
