In its first external fundraising round, SingleInterface, a Singaporean SaaS startup that helps offline businesses use the web to boost revenue, raised $30 million. The company plans to use the funds to expand its international reach and enhance its offerings to better align with global brands.
Businesses have been using internet marketing techniques in order to draw in more clients and boost sales, even if being offline is still common for companies in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. The world’s internet user base is expanding, and that is the main cause of that. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that 5.4 billion people, or about 67% of the world’s population, use the internet. This indicates a 4.7% increase from 2022. In contrast, the UN agency reported that as of 2023, there were 2.6 billion people on Earth who were not online.
Still, it’s hard to find a one-stop shop for internet access. While some might only be helpful for getting listed on search engines, others might assist businesses in creating websites. In a similar vein, certain solutions are sector-specific. SingleInterface offers a range of products to multi-location companies in the food and beverage, retail, or automotive industries in order to solve this issue.
The firm assists over 400 multi-location brands in managing the online presence of their brick-and-mortar stores and retail outlets throughout India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. It offers resources to help companies increase online customer engagement, improve discovery through search engine and map listings, handle customer feedback and online reviews, and even create websites with SEO management that provide insights for every location. Additionally, the startup leverages AI to make it easier for companies to digitize thousands of stores at once.
SingleInterface’s co-founder and CEO, Tarun Sobhani, told TechCrunch that the company’s products enable companies to increase sales by 15% to 20%.
“Enabling marketing strategies at a storefront level becomes a very tedious task for a brand because devising thousands of marketing strategies for thousands of stores is never easy. That’s where the whole AI automation piece comes in, which enables a better marketing ROI for each store,” he said in an interview.
In addition to enabling companies to build comprehensive store-level websites for their local stores, SingleInterface enables two-way communication via WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google Business Messages, as well as the execution of localized offers and events within a specific area. The startup assists multi-location companies in comprehending the reasons behind the low ratings of certain outlets and the high ratings of others (four or five stars). Additionally, it facilitates the management of online campaigns for several locations from a single source, optimizing them according to their local competition, market conditions, and unique business hours.
Customers of SingleInterface already include several group firms of major Indian conglomerates, such as Tata Group, Reliance Group, Aditya Birla Group, and Bajaj Group, in addition to well-known brands like KFC, Pizza Hut, Nissan, Apollo Tyres, HDFC Bank, and TVS Motors. Additionally, it is expanding throughout Australia and Southeast Asia, with plans to soon expand into Japan and Korea as well as the Middle East.
PayPal Ventures was one of the investors in the all-equity round, which was led by Asia Partners, a growth investment firm in Singapore. According to Sobhani, the business intends to use the additional funding to expand its geographic reach, keep making investments in its goods, and improve the overall customer experience, as reported by TechCrunch.
We are ecstatic to be working together with Tarun, Harish, and the SingleInterface team to support their aspirations for international and Indian expansion. Oliver Rippel, co-founder of Asia Partners, said in a prepared statement that SingleInterface “has shown an exceptional track record of fostering customer engagement and commerce for large enterprises over the last several years and has firmly established itself as a prominent player in the region, successfully integrating offline and online customer journeys to drive growth for physical retail locations.”