Share Treats, a startup that operates the Gifticon service in South East Asia, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Bon Angels and K Bridge Investment.
Share Treats allows people to purchase and present digital coupons with prepaid mobile phones. Coupons items include daily use products from convenience stores and fast-food products such as ice-cream, hot dogs, sandwiches, coffee, movie tickets, and haircut vouchers. The prices range from less than USD 1 to USD 5, and when people gift coupons they can accompany their gift with short messages and stickers. Share Treats solves small and large inconveniences in existing ways of purchasing coupons at offline stores and contributes to the new culture of giving casual treats to others, as a Share Treats spokesperson mentioned.
Payment is an important aspect of Share Treats. Because it carried out its first prepaid mobile phone gifticon service in the Philippines, Share Treats made strategic partnership agreements with local carriers. Credit card and bank account penetration in South East Asian countries is usually less than 20% so only a certain amount of people are able to make online payments through e-commerce services. Thus, the size of the market was estimated to be low compared with the growth potential of the e-commerce market. Because of this, the Share Treats team focused on localizing payment in each country with over 10 years of business experience in South East Asia.
Simon Seok-heun Kang, CEO and partner of Bon Angels, mentioned that, in South East Asia, there are various opportunities yet to succeed if products with proven core values can be provided. He added to that the main reason of this investment was that, because of the spread of smartphones and user data proliferation, Share Treats analysed cultures and local expense trends in details so the product became a well localised O2O casual commerce service.
Lee Hong-bae, CEO of Share Treats, said that the vision of Share Treats is to create a cultural movement whereby anyone in South East Asia, including students, drivers, helpers, and part-time workers can interact more through casual gifts. He also mentioned about the near future of Share Treats that the lifestyle category will expand and people in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and more countries will be able to use Share Treats.
(Top photo from Baidu Images.)
This article, entitled “Gifticon service operator Share Treats lands undisclosed funding to expand into new markets”, was written in Korean by Platum , edited by AllTechAsia.