Single interfacea SaaS startup that offers offline businesses tools to grow their revenue by leveraging the web has raised $30 million in its maiden external fundraising round as the Singaporean startup seeks to expand its footprint internationally and improve products to makes it more relevant to global brands.
While offline is still important for businesses in major markets including the US, Asia and Europe, businesses have started adopting online marketing strategies to attract more customers and increase their revenue. The main reason for this is the increasing number of Internet users around the world. Almost 67% of the world’s population, or 5.4 billion people, are online, according the International Telecommunication Union. This shows a 4.7% increase from 2022. In contrast, the United Nations agency reported that the world’s offline population will steadily decline to 2.6 billion in 2023.
However, finding a single solution for connecting to the internet is a challenge. Some may help businesses build a website, while others may only be useful for registering with search engines. Likewise, some solutions are limited to a specific domain. SingleInterface addresses this problem by providing a suite of products to brands across multiple locations, whether in food and beverage, retail or automotive.
The startup works with more than 400 multi-location brands across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East to help them manage the digital presence of their physical and retail stores. It provides tools that allow businesses to drive online customer engagement, improve search engine discovery and map listings, manage web comments and reviews, and even create SEO-managed websites, providing insights for each business location. The startup also uses artificial intelligence to ease the journey of businesses to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses increase their revenue by 15-20% using its products.
“Activating store-level marketing strategies becomes a very tedious task for a brand because coming up with 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 every store,” he said in an interview.
In addition to allowing businesses to create detailed store-level websites of their local stores, SingleInterface allows them to run local promotions and events at a specific location and communicate two-way via WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Business Messages. The startup also helps multi-location brands understand why some stores have poor ratings while others have four or five star ratings. Moreover, it helps to run online campaigns for different locations from a single source and optimize them based on their local competitors, market dynamics and different opening hours.
SingleInterface already counts brands such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Nissan, Apollo Tyres, HDFC Bank and TVS Motors, as well as several major Indian conglomerate group companies, including the Tata Group, Reliance Group, Aditya Birla Group and Bajaj Group, among its customers. her. . It is also scaling up in Southeast Asia and Australia and wants to enter Japan and Korea soon and expand into the Middle East.
Led by Singapore-based growth investment firm Asia Partners, the all-equity round was led by PayPal Ventures. The startup plans to use the new funds to grow its geographic presence and continue to invest in its products and further enhance the consumer experience, Sobhani told TechCrunch.
Before the new round, the SingleInterface was bootstrapped. Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of online consumer investor and business builder Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015. But Sobhani said it was 2017 when she got out and started offering her tools to clients.
SingleInterface currently has a team of approximately 235 people, most of whom are based in India, with a development center in New Delhi. Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to increase its presence.
“We are excited to partner with Tarun, Harish and the SingleInterface team to support their growth ambitions in India and globally. SingleInterface has demonstrated an excellent track record of driving customer engagement and commerce for large enterprises over the past few years and has firmly established itself as a prominent player in the region, successfully integrating offline and online customer journeys to drive growth in brick-and-mortar retail locations. Oliver Rippel, co-founder of Asia Partners, said in a prepared statement.
