Boxme, a Vietnam-based premier e-commerce fulfillment company, recently announced it had secured an investment of $6.4 million (over VND150 billion) from local technology firm NextTech Group and digital payment platform Ngan Luong.
Boxme’s goal is to become the largest logistics service provider in Vietnam. With the success of this funding round, the e-commerce startup plans to quickly expand the scale of fulfillment centers in the country to maximize the demand for order fulfillment and shipping services for e-commerce businesses.
Founded in 2016 by Han Van Loi (Mark), Boxme pioneered logistics e-commerce in Vietnam — providing services for more than 600 major brands such as Panasonic, Colgate, King Power, Tefal, No1, AHC, Thegioiskinfood, and Merzy, among others. With nine logistics centers in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, Boxme is able to partner with huge international brands with its extensive warehouse system and advanced technology with automated order fulfillment.
In Vietnam alone, they have three large fulfillment centers with a scale of more than 12,000 m2 and a processing speed of more than 50,000 orders per day during mega campaigns of many major e-commerce platforms.
“BOXME always tries our best to improve the service quality,” Boxme founder Mark penned in his LinkedIn post. “At the same time, focus on infrastructure and technology development, bringing professional logistics service experiences.”
He said the capital would be used to expand their fulfillment centers to 30,000 square meters with the capacity to handle 150,000 orders per day. This allows Boxme to triple its daily capacity.
A July 2022 report from the Google and Bain & Company shows that Vietnamese people love online shopping, and the country leads the region in a number of indicators. In fact, Vietnam currently accounts for 15% of all online shopping in Southeast Asia, second only to Thailand, with 16%, and on par with the Philippines. Not even the global pandemic changed that.
According to Mark, while the COVID-19 pandemic changed how businesses operate, it also served as an opportunity for e-commerce businesses in general and logistics Vietnamese e-commerce in particular. He added that during the two peak years of the pandemic, Boxme’s operations as well as their dispatchers had to work at maximum capacity to process the number of online orders.
With this funding, NextTech Group and Ngan Luong expect Boxme to become the leading logistics technology enterprise in Southeast Asia, bringing professional logistics service experiences to customers, facilitating and simplification of business expansion of regional and international e-commerce enterprises.
“The explosion of e-commerce has led to the development of e-commerce logistics such as order fulfillment and delivery,” Nguyen Hoa Binh, chairman of NextTech Group and also a shark on Shark Tank Vietnam.
Dubbed the Alibaba of Vietnam, NextTech was established in 2001 and belongs to the first generation of technology startups in the country — currently operating in four main areas, including e-commerce, fintech, digital logistics, and edtech. Hoa Binh’s firm also owns several other brands like mPos and Ngan Luong, the other investor of Boxme. Ngan Luong is one of Vietnam's most popular payment gateways, processing over US$50 million in monthly transactions from over 100,000 websites and apps.