26 Feb 2014 Tradeshift secures $75 million and a foothold in the Far East
There’s a distinct change in tone in the latest press release from Tradeshift. It’s happy.
I’m not saying that press releases in the past were miserable, it’s just that I would have used other words to describe their character – frenetic or excited perhaps.
And the Tradeshift team has good reason to be happy. The headline announces the $75 million investment that they’ve just secured but what is really good news for the Tradeshifters, their customers and investors is the foothold they just gained in the third largest economy in the world.
I spoke to Christian Lanng about the announcement yesterday. “People talk about Brazil and Mexico as the next big e-invoicing markets but they overlook the Far East. China is the second biggest economy in the world and Japan is the third”
And it seems that Japan doesn’t just have an appetite for e-invoicing – it seems that it’s the Tradeshift platform that has caught the eye of Singapore’s Scentan Ventures, the internet entrepreneurs behind this latest round of funding.
As part of the deal designed to support global expansion in the US, Europe and now Asia, Scentan Ventures get exclusive product development, sales, marketing and service rights to the Tradeshift platform throughout Japan. Scentan Ventures’ Managing Director, Noriaki Okubo, will join Tradeshift’s board. That addition to the senior team could bring a different way of thinking and a new direction to the Tradeshift story.
I will be keeping a close eye on this one.
Pete Loughlin can be found on twitter @peteloughlin
