Buyandship Concludes Series B Round with $10 Million Investment

Buyandship, a global cross-border eCommerce platform headquartered in Hong Kong, announced on September 11 the first closing of its Series B round, led by Cool Japan Fund, with a $10 million strategic investment.

The funds will be used for operations automation, research and development in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, and market expansion into the Southeast Asia (SEA) regions, according to a statement released by the company on Monday.

Cool Japan Fund was established in November 2013 as a public-private partnership backed by the Japanese government with the goal of contributing to Japan's long-term economic growth through the expansion of overseas demand and supply of appealing products and services unique to Japanese lifestyle and culture.

Buyandship claims to be a market leader in cross-border ecommerce thanks to its strong community, data analytics, and logistics network, having processed $383 million in gross merchandise value (GMV) in the previous fiscal year.

Buyandship stated that it has worked hard to improve its technological capabilities in order to provide real value to customers. It has built an automated shopping assistant over the last 12 months, utilising a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) model to increase its order processing capacity.

In the future, the Buyaholic social commerce platform will include an AI-powered recommendation system. This system will use an algorithm to automatically feed user-generated content (UGC) based on behavioural records in order to increase user stickiness and engagement.