Malaysia’s Ebizu raises $3m from Singaporean investors

Malaysia-based retail advertising and intelligence technology provider, Ebizu Sdn Bhd, has secured a round of Series A investment amounting to $3 million from undisclosed Singapore investors to fuel its regional expansion plans.

Ebizu’s operations has grown to a team of 130 people spread across offices in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Established in 2013, Ebizu, an O2O (Online to Offline) solutions provider which specializes in retail advertising and location intelligence, has expanded within the Southeast Asia region. Co-founder Rohit Maheswaran said, the company has been aggressively enhancing its solution as well as expanding its beacon and retailer network in the past five months. “Behind all these, negotiations for investments were being conducted and we were glad to see so many interested parties. This round of  funding will help us maintain the intensity of our growth,” he said.

“We emphasise on helping physical retailers and brands reach out and engage with their consumers, our product is evolving to become more data driven, so that merchants and brands can acquire and retain customers with more precision,” Maheswaran said.

He added that Ebizu’s brand new geo-behavioural intelligence and insights platform will help advertisers target online and offline ads better. Seeing the accelerated growth in digital ad spend and mobile advertising, Ebizu was formed to bridge the gap between brick and mortar retailers and mobile technology utilization.

The company’s integrated retail solutions empower the offline retailers with knowledge of the customer’s journey, enabling retailers to reach and engage shoppers’ on-the- go with promotions, vouchers and loyalty campaigns, engaging them at the right time and optimizing sale conversions.

Currently, Ebizu’s merchant network consists of 1,900 retail outlets with the target of 5,000 to be reached by the end of 2016. It also has around 5,000 geofenced points of interest and 10,000 BLE beacons installed across Malaysia and Indonesia, at the moment, with hopes to grow that network to 25,000 by year end.

At the end of last year, it was named the 2015 Asia Pacific BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) in Connected Retail Company of the year by Frost & Sullivan.