Following a successful seed funding round last quarter, Prosperna, a Filipino eCommerce SaaS startup catering to micro-small, and medium enterprises, is looking to scale their B2B solutions to more businesses in the Philippines, before expanding to address the online selling needs of businesses across neighboring Southeast Asian countries.
Founded in 2018, Prosperna bootstrapped its way through its first year, growing their team from 12 to 30 employees. In 2021, they raised roughly $555,000 in seed funding from local investors. Following their seed round, Prosperna created new products, including their social commerce platform, launched more payment solutions and shipping options, and subsequently grew their user base to over 1,500 merchants in just three months. According to Founder and CEO Dennis Velasco, this all builds towards their near term goal of growing that base to 100,000 Filipino businesses.
With the Philippine eCommerce market valued at $4 billion and estimated to reach $12 billion by 2025, countless digital businesses are rushing to meet the massive eCommerce opportunity. However, most businesses aren’t equipped to deal with the comprehensive operations of eCommerce, which often requires additional resources in sales, marketing, fulfillment, and logistics.
“The key value proposition that we wanted to deliver is enabling [MSMEs] to have only one account, one system [so that] they could get the ‘golden triangle’ of what they need in the early stage of their journey into eCommerce,” Velasco said.
This “golden triangle” refers to payments, shipping, and online presence (whether on a website or across social media). This year, Prosperna plans to scale up their operations by recruiting more employees, developing new solutions for their customers, and building a broader partner ecosystem. To fuel their expansion plans, Prosperna has focused on bringing down the barriers to entry for businesses going digital, requiring no coding experience to be able to set up their online operations. Their flagship offering is a full-suite eCommerce website builder with integrations for shipping and a wide selection of payment partners.
With the recent launch of MyChat, Prosperna takes those same integrations and packs them into a lighter-weight “mini-store”, using chatbots to automate the entire sales process within Facebook Messenger’s social commerce platform.
Velasco says these efforts are all part of their near-term strategy of perfecting their model and focusing on solutions tailored specifically to the Filipino market. Then, they’ll begin expanding those solutions to assist more businesses in Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia in entering the digital shopping space.
Data from Statista valued the Southeast Asian eCommerce market at $67.6 billion dollars in 2021, growing at a cumulative annual growth rate of 10.28% to 2025. According to the most recent e-Conomy SEA 2021 Report, the region saw an eCommerce boom through the pandemic, adding 70 million new shoppers since its onset. The number of respondents who claim to shop predominantly online increased from 33% in 2020 to 45% in 2021. By 2026, the number of online shoppers across the region was forecasted to reach 380 million.
“We’ve done our homework and found out that [other Southeast Asian countries have] the same pains and the same gains, just in different languages,” Velasco said. “Perhaps it’s time for Southeast Asia—and the world—to see the first global B2B SaaS company from the Philippines.”