SingleInterface, a SaaS startup offering tools to offline businesses to grow their revenues by leveraging the web, has raised $30 million in its maiden external fundraising round as the Singaporean startup seeks to expand its footprint internationally and improve products to make them more relevant to global brands.
While being offline is still prominent for enterprises across major markets, including the U.S., Asia and Europe, businesses have started embracing online marketing strategies to attract more customers and increase their revenues. The primary reason for that is the growing number of internet users across the globe. Nearly 67% of the world’s population, or 5.4 billion people, is online, according to the International Telecommunication Union. This shows a growth of 4.7% since 2022. In contrast, the United Nations’ agency said the global offline population steadily dipped to 2.6 billion in 2023.
Nonetheless, finding a one-stop solution to getting online is challenging. Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines. Similarly, some solutions are limited to a particular sector. SingleInterface addresses that problem by providing a suite of products to multi-location brands, whether in the food and beverage, retail, or automotive business.
The startup works with over 400 multi-location brands across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East to help them manage the digital presence of their physical stores and retail outlets. It provides tools to let businesses drive customer engagement online, enhance discoveries through search engines and maps listings, manage feedback and web reviews, and even build websites with SEO management, delivering insights for each business location. The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15% to 20% using its products.
“Enabling marketing strategies at a storefront level becomes a very tedious task for a brand because devising thousands of marketing strategies for thousands of stores is never easy. That’s where the whole AI automation piece comes in, which enables a better marketing ROI for each store,” he said in an interview.
Alongside letting businesses create detailed store-level websites of their local stores, SingleInterface allows them to run localized offers and events within a particular location and communicate two-way over WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Business Messages. The startup also helps multi-location brands understand why some stores have poor ratings while others have four- or five-star ratings. Further, it helps run online campaigns for different locations from a single source and optimize them based on their local competitors, market dynamics and distinct business hours.
SingleInterface already counts brands such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Nissan, Apollo Tyres, HDFC Bank and TVS Motor, as well as multiple group companies of large Indian conglomerates, including Tata Group, Reliance Group, Aditya Birla Group and Bajaj Group, among its customers. It is also scaling up in Southeast Asia and Australia and is looking to enter Japan and Korea soon and scale up in the Middle East.
Led by Singapore’s growth investment firm Asia Partners, the all-equity round saw the participation of PayPal Ventures. The startup plans to use the new funds to grow its geographical presence and to continue investing in its products and further enhance consumer experience, Sobhani told TechCrunch.
Before the fresh round, SingleInterface was bootstrapped. Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015. However, Sobhani said it was 2017 when it went out and started offering its tools to customers.
SingleInterface currently has a team of about 235 people, most of whom are based in India, with its development center in New Delhi. Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with Tarun, Harish, and the SingleInterface team to support their growth ambitions in India and globally. SingleInterface has shown an exceptional track record of fostering customer engagement and commerce for large enterprises over the last several years and has firmly established itself as a prominent player in the region, successfully integrating offline and online customer journeys to drive growth for physical retail locations,” Oliver Rippel, co-founder of Asia Partners, said in a prepared statement.
