Thanks to cross-border e-commerce platforms, China continues to be a major exporter of consumer goods to the world in the age of online shopping. It’s not just marketplaces like Amazon and AliExpress that allow Chinese businesses to sell overseas. Behind the scenes, a group of startups is creating software that makes it easier for exporters to understand what and how to sell.
Dianxiaomi, roughly translated as “shop assistant”, is one such SaaS e-commerce provider. The company just secured $110 million in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund II and Sequoia Capital China. Other prominent investors including Tiger Global Management, GGV Capital and Huaxing Growth Capital also participated.
The funding brings the company’s total investment to $210 million in 2022 alone.
Dianxiaomi is strategically located in Shenzhen, the capital of export-oriented e-commerce in China. The city that is home to Huawei, Tencent and DJI is also one known to house the most Amazon sellers in the world.
Dianxiaomi started with a convenient tool that allows sellers to list their products that have already been sold on Taobao, Alibaba’s marketplace for Chinese consumers, on Wish with one click. said its founder and CEO Du Jianyin, a former R&D engineer at Baidu, in an interview.
From there, Dianxiaomi went on to create a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for Chinese suppliers of Wish, Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Shopee, Lazada and the like. Target users are small and medium-sized sellers with 5,000 orders per day or less, the company told TechCrunch.
The SaaS provider itself is also expanding overseas. It launched localized ERP products for sellers in Southeast Asia and Latin America, respectively. Globally, it claims to serve 1.5 million users and has partnered with around 50 e-commerce platforms. In Southeast Asia, it has amassed 430,000 users who are selling in the booming region.
The company plans to open offices in Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, where it aims to build a team of 20-100 employees to handle customer service, operations and other tasks in each country.
Landing in Southeast Asia is an obvious choice for many Chinese entrepreneurs who see similar opportunities in the region as they saw in their home market a decade ago.
“With its rapid growth rate, [Southeast Asia] it’s a bit like China from ten years ago. Second, the region is culturally similar with a large ethnic Chinese population, which can help promote products. And third, orders from Southeast Asia are growing by over 100% annually,” the executive noted in the interview.
The financing for Dianxiaomi is one of the few deals SoftBank has struck this year in China, long a major destination for the investment powerhouse. But amid a slowing economy and regulatory uncertainty, the company said last year that it would take a more “cautious” approach to backing Chinese startups.
In January, SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China injected funding in a similar venture called Shoplazza, a Canadian and Shenzhen-based company that powers direct-to-consumer brands with online store management tools.