Airfrov, a peer-to-peer marketplace for overseas products, has received US$500,000 in pre‐Series A funding round led by existing investor leading VC firm East Ventures. Several angel investors, including Carro CEO Aaron Tan, have also contributed to this round.

Singapore-headquartered Airfov plans to use the latest funding to further enhance its product offerings and scale the development teams.

Said CEO and Co‐founder Cai Li: “We are proud to have built a vibrant community of shoppers who use our app frequently to discover trending products overseas. Our team is working hard on new features to improve the process of buying and bringing unique overseas products for our users at an even faster rate.”

The investment comes over a year after the startup secured an undisclosed amount in seed funding from East Ventures.

Started in 2015, Airfrov is a mobile and online P2P marketplace that matches shoppers with travellers to bring unique items home from overseas. Shoppers can get their favourite brands and unique items, such as beauty products, bags, local snacks, collectibles, fashion gadgets, etc. from all over the world.

The startup claims it currently has a growing community of around 45,000 active shoppers and more than 3,500 travellers travelling abroad monthly. Airfrov discovers more than 10,00 new or unique overseas products every week through shoppers’ requests and travellers’ recommendations. At least one new request for these products is posted every 2 minutes, and it takes just 3.5 minutes to receive a traveller’s offer when the new requests posted by shoppers are for items from popular countries such as Japan or South Korea.

The platform offers protection for both shoppers and travellers through an escrow payment service, supported by seller verification and peer reviews.

“We are impressed with the team’s ambitions and the traction they have achieved to date. Cai Li and his team have built a platform that has a competitive advantage over other marketplaces,” said Willson Cuaca, Managing Partner at East Ventures.

East Ventures aims to bring success to ventures by providing early-stage seed capital to promising startups. With a total of fiveoffices in Jakarta, Tokyo, and San Francisco, its global team has invested in over 150 companies across Asia and the US. Its portfolio of companies include Shopback, Tokopedia and Traveloka.

Source: e27