E-commerce platform developer BorderX Lab has raised $20m in its Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Participation to the round also came from Hillhouse Capital Group, China Broadband Capital, Welight Capital and iFly Venture Capital.
BorderX Lab, headquartered in California, helps western brands and merchants with building cross-border e-commerce solutions to target Chinese consumers. The company’s first product is Beyond App, which supports American and European fashion, beauty, healthcare and lifestyle businesses with selling to China. BorderX hopes to expand this to other countries in the future.
Its platform implements machine learning and AI technology to support automated global commerce, merchant product catalogues, process consumer orders, shipping route optimisation, and customs and tax processing, among other services.
The mobile app helps to create personalised shopping experiences for customers and enables western companies to accept payments from local providers such as Alipay.
The company is partnered with over 50 retailers including Saks, Peter Thomas Roth, Finish Line, Forzieri and Everlane.
Capital from the round will be used to drive its international expansion, build new platform features and improve the customer experience. BorderX will also look to hire more members to its Sunnyvale and Shanghai teams.
iFly Venture Capital founding partner Han Shen said, “As a young VC fund, iFly stays away from buzzword-centric investments and focuses on backing visionary entrepreneurs who seek to fundamentally transform industries through innovative approaches. The BorderX Lab team is highly creative and has built a great international team from the United States and China.”
Last year, China’s FinTech sector was dominated by the payments and remittance space, accounting for 41 per cent of the $2.4bn that was invested, according to data by FinTech Global.
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