Tinvio, a communication platform for supply chain merchants, gets $5.5 million seed round

Being a supply chain merchant often means cobbling together different ways of keeping in touch with buyers, including emails, text messages and paper invoices. Tinvio wants to simplify the process with a communication and commerce platform designed especially for managing orders.

The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding, led by Sequoia Capital India's Surge early-stage accelerator program, with participation from Global Founders Capital and Partech Partners.

Along with a pre-seed round from Rocket Internet, this brings Tinvio's total raised so far to $6.5 million. The startup was founded in July 2019 by Ajay Gopal, who previously worked at Rocket Internet in Berlin. Before that, he was a fintech investment banker at Credit Suisse.

Since launching, Tinvio's customer base has grown to over 1,000 businesses in more than 10 cities. Over the next 12 months, it plans to add more cities and languages, as well as digital financial services.

Tinvio is targeted at small-to mid-sized merchants, and many of its customers are in the food and beverage (F&B), retail and healthcare supply industries.

"At its core, Tinvio is a real-time messaging app. For every 10 orders placed on Tinvio, there's an average of two messages sent, reinforcing that communication is critical in fragmented supply chains," Gopal told TechCrunch.

One of Tinvio's selling points is that merchants can continue to receive orders through their existing channels, including email, SMS or WhatsApp. By consolidating those orders in one app, Tinvio is also able to create a real-time digital ledger, making it easier for merchants to track invoices, fulfillment and finances.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, order volumes between merchants and suppliers on Tinvio have fallen about 30% to 50% in most cities, Gopal said, "though retention rates remain high, suggesting that many businesses are trying their best to stay open. We talk to them often, and we're quite awed by their resilience to keep trying, keep finding a way to make it work."

He added, "Our tech is designed to be fully customizable, so we've started organically supporting many of their new use cases."

For example, some food and beverage merchants have started using Tinvio to manage group orders with consumers instead. Since many businesses have let go of staff, this means merchants have become more reliant on the app to keep track of orders and inbound/outbound deliveries. Tinvio has started expanding this into a new feature and also begun customizing soft-integrations for suppliers so they don't have to manually add data to their ERP software.

Two weeks ago, Tinvio also launched a project called Save Our Nomnoms to help direct more orders to food and beverage merchants in Singapore, which is currently under partial lockdown. The project started with 40 brands, and has since grown to include more than 300 brands.