DEUNA, a Mexico-based one-click checkout commerce startup, is formally becoming a member of Latin America’s nearly $100 billion e-commerce sector with $30 million in Sequence A funding after largely staying beneath the radar since being based in late 2020.
Co-founders Roberto Enrique Kafati Santos and Jose Maria Serrano began the corporate after a profession at McKinsey main digital funds for Kafati Santos and at supply firm JOKR for Serrano. In addition they just lately introduced on Jose Jorge Molina, who was beforehand chief advertising and marketing officer for Bitso, to affix the founding workforce to steer advertising and marketing.
“Individuals have been searching for assist digitizing their companies, and as we began trying into this, realized that manufacturers wanted assist promoting on-line,” Kafati Santos advised Nob6. “On the time, we didn’t perceive the chance to do an e-commerce platform, however the resolution was apparent, and we’ve performed funds ever since. We helped a number of manufacturers final yr and have now elevated our gross sales 5 instances.”
E-commerce is a scorching market in Latin America, with the founders estimating it would develop 30% annually. Nonetheless, they are saying the market continues to be tormented by three challenges: buyer acceptance, conversion and fraud.
That’s why they are saying they’re constructing a “Commerce 3.0” that can deal with all three of these. DEUNA offers a funds infrastructure that integrates with main fee suppliers and various fee strategies and offers retailers entry to greater than 3 million customers. As well as, retailers can use the instruments to deal with fee orchestration, fee processing, fraud prevention and lifecycle administration based mostly on actionable person real-time analytics.
Specifically, to fight acceptance, DEUNA will supply a number of fee strategies, which Kafati Santos believes may even assist clear up the issue of conversion, the place some 70% of customers abandon their cart at checkout. The corporate has been capable of improve acceptance charges by 40% and show out about thrice greater conversion charges, he stated.
In Latin America, that’s typically as a consequence of about half of shoppers not having their fee technique of alternative accepted. On prime of that, these whose fee is accepted, one in 20 funds are fraudulent, for instance, a fee made with a stolen bank card, he added. That’s why DEUNA is constructing its personal fraud tech with customized guidelines for retailers that cuts down on fee fraud and denials.
With a somewhat massive e-commerce market, lots of one-click rivals have entered, primarily pushed by the buyer shopping for conduct shift that occurred over the previous two years. We just lately noticed Smooth increase $1.7 million to get began in an area that’s dominated by firms like Ownit, Bolt, Checkout.com, OurPass and Rapyd, which have collectively raised greater than $3 billion in investments inside the previous 18 months. Throughout that point, Colombia-based Addi stated it was entering into the one-click house after taking in a $75 million extension to its Sequence B.
Kafati Santos stated DEUNA has been capable of differentiate itself from lots of the gamers in that it’s fixing the entire acceptance-conversion-fraud triangle, whereas others are simply going after items of it.
Over the previous two years, Kafati Santos and Serrano had bootstrapped the enterprise for probably the most half, except a $7 million seed spherical in October 2021. They’ve grown income 120 instances within the final yr and introduced on purchasers, together with KFC, Pappos and Dunkin’ Donuts.
This new funding of $30 million was led by Activant Capital, with participation from Valor Capital, Summary Ventures, Acrew Capital, Add Ventures and a bunch of particular person founder traders from firms together with Plaid, Kavak, Jeeves, Xepelin, iFood and R2. The corporate raised a complete of $37 million.
The founders plan to make use of the brand new capital to increase its presence in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Chile, product improvement, go-to-market, including workers to its workforce of 90 and coming into new nations, like Brazil, within the coming months.
David Yang, associate at Activant Capital, stated his agency has invested in a lot of fintech firms and believes DEUNA is doing one thing distinctive.
“Elevating a $30M Sequence A is difficult in any market, however with their backdrop, we had excessive conviction in what they’re doing,” Yang stated. “It is a huge market alternative, in some methods extra compelling than the U.S. DEUNA’s method can also be holistic somewhat than simply items of the market. The workforce, and the imaginative and prescient they’d with Jose (Molina) becoming a member of, has had sturdy execution to this point.”
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