Una Brands Raises $40M to Acquire Expansion along with Aggressive Hiring

Una Brands is a company that provides fast, fair, and simplified ways to sell companies and businesses for the owners of e-commerce businesses. This company was founded in 2020 and has its headquartered in Singapore. With the help of significant growth capital, the company has succeeded in transforming into its household name from an e-commerce brand. 

The Artificial Intelligence and data analytics platform of Una Brands will help computerize and optimize the processes by giving them an aggressive edge.

Kiren Tanna, Adrian Johnston, Kushal Patel, Tobias Heusch, and Srinivasan Sridharan founded this company with the mission of reshaping the future of e-commerce by purchasing great brands and then developing them into global, valued, and enduring household names. 

The company has announced that it has secured $40 million in an equity and debt funding round but refused to disclose the ratio of the funding capital. And also didn’t reveal the valuation of the company.

This equity and debt funding round was headed by a number of giant investors including 500 Startups, 468 Capital, Kingsway Capital, Global Founders Capitals, Presight Capital, and the former CEO of Lazada, Maximilian Bitter. 

At the time of the company’s foundation, the co-founder of Una Brands, Tanna said that every seller in Asia is using multiple platforms to buy their products instead of just using Amazon. A big gap has been seen in the fast-growing e-commerce market but the West’s player is confined to a single platform and is not able to look at others and this leads them to focus on the APAC, start a business and then acquire multiple sellers who are trading at a number of different platforms. 

Una looks for those brands to acquire which have an annual revenue ranging between $3 hundred thousand to $20 million. It is open to several categories as long as they have strong stock-keeping units and low seasonality. The offering price of the company ranges between 6 hundred thousand dollars to 3 million dollars. 

With the fresh capital, which has been a mixture of equity and debt, Unna decided to use the debt capital for buying brands as this capital is non-dilutive. And they decided to use the rest of the capital in aggressive hiring to evaluate brands in their pipelines. Currently, Una works in Malaysia, Australia, and Singapore but is now planning to expand in South Asia before heading toward Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

Kiren Tanna, the cofounder of Una Brands said that Amazon sellers are completely aware that they can find a product, then sell it for 4-5 years, and then make a multi-million exit deal and go for building another product or choose to go for a vacation. And he noted that this is something that the Asian sellers are not aware of. Tanna said that they see all this as a phase of education and learning to explain the flow of the process, it works, and also why it makes sense to sell their businesses to them. 

San Francisco, California-based  500 Startups, which was one of the investors of Una Brands’ equity and debt round, is a capital market company that was founded in 2010 by Christine Tsai and Dave McClure. The firm has over $2.7 billion in assets under management and invests in fast-growing technology companies.

The London-based investment company, Kingsway Capital also participated in Una’s new round. It is an investment management firm that was founded in 2017 by Manuel Stotz. It is focused on the frontier of emerging markets and has a total assets management of $2 billion. 

Conclusion

Una Brands has raised $40 million in an equity and debt funding round. The round was led by a number of giant investors including 500 Startups, Global Founders Capitals, Presight Capital, 468 Capital, Kingsway Capital, and the former CEO of Lazada, Maximilian Bitter. The company aims to use the fresh capital as the debt capital for buying brands as this capital is non-dilutive. And they decided to use the rest of the capital in aggressive hiring and expansion of their company’s roots to South Asia. 

Faq