Singapore startup Semantics3 in new funding round

Singaporean software startup Semantics3 Friday said it has successfully closed a $1.55 million round of bridge funding, with Brussels-based seed investor E-Merge bringing $1.5 million to the table.

The company will use the latest funding, which also saw participation from early-stage investor Zillionize, to expand its business team and ramp up sales efforts. The company had raised $600,000 from the two investors in a previous financing round in March 2013.

“We are at break even, but we’re not profitable yet,” chief executive Varun Sivamani told CNBC.

Semantics3’s proprietary software allows companies to more efficiently track their products. Conventional barcodes are unable to track products and prices in real time across the internet, which creates a conundrum for e-commerce retailers.

The four-year-old startup’s over-the-top software solves this problem by allowing them to use their barcodes to access detailed information about any item in their inventory, and track the price of their products in real time across a variety of websites.

While competitors Indix and Factual have more funding and a larger share of the market, Semantics3’s software is currently being used by retailers, as well logistics, industrial supply, and insurance companies, including Liberty Mutual and American Family Insurance, the company said.

The brain child of three students from the National University of Singapore, Semantics3 in 2013 became the first Singaporean startup to make it into the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program that has also seen participation from bitcoin wallet provider Coinbase and Codeacademy.

With some 99 percent of Semantics3’s customers based in the US, the company is looking forward to stress testing some of its software’s new features during the Black Friday sales in the US later on this month.