GoGoVan, a mobile startup that matches delivery vehicles up with the people that need them, has raised US $6.5 million in Series A funding. The homegrown startup was able to secure the deal in just 4 weeks with Centurion Private Equity (headquartered in Singapore with offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai) and a group of prominent Singaporean-based investors.
We had a chat with co-founder Steven Lam to get an update on his startup since we featured him in a “3 Founders to Watch” post earlier this year.
He said that since expanding to Singapore back in June of this year, GoGoVan has already added 2,000 registered vehicles to their platform. This is in addition to their current user base of 18,000 on the driver’s side, which collectively makes up the largest logistics fleet in Hong Kong.
Steven said that due to similarities between the two city-states, Singapore was seen as an ideal market to test the waters for the rest of Southeast Asia. “Singapore’s economic nature is very similar to Hong Kong’s, because they’re both trading hubs. Also, how small and medium companies and people move things around town are very similar, so we thought it was the best place to test our product,” he said.
Having seen success in Singapore, GoGoVan will use the capital to fund their Asia-Pacific domination plans and Steven has said that Taiwan, Malaysia and Australian cities are on their list. Besides expanding to new cities, GoGoVan is also ramping up the hiring for a number of roles including customer service reps, operation managers and programmers which is mainly done through referrals and internal recruitment at the moment.
Besides reaching over 20,000 registered commercial vehicles in both Hong Kong and Singapore, GoGoVan has gained quite a bit of traction since their June 2013 launch. Besides winning the ‘Best Mobile App’ award at this year’s Hong Kong ICT Awards and bringing on corporate clients including Kerry Logistics, SF Express and DHL, the young startup has processed over a million transactions worth over HK $120 million to date.
As a successful startup originally built on local pain points, Steven encourages first-time founders to forge ahead despite Hong Kong being called time and time again – “too small of a market.”
“When I started, a lot of investors, friends and the startup community always said that if the idea only solves local problems, it’s not going to get very big,” he said. After using Hong Kong as a test market, the GoGoVan team discovered other Asia-Pacific cities with similar needs and knew they had a scalable business on their hands.
Using Facebook’s legendary rise to success as an example, Steven urges startups not to shy away from small ideas. Originally created for the Harvard student body, the social network quickly expanded throughout the US, broke out of the Ivy League exclusivity and went global.
“If everyone knew how to build a big idea from the beginning, no one would work on a small idea,” he said. “Besides, all of the big companies start from a small idea.”
Mighty Morphin GoGoVan commercial in Cantonese:
