Launched in June 2020, Peeba now provides more than 100,000 wholesale products from 15,000 brands and specialty stores around the world to 25,000 retail businesses in Asia Pacific Region, the largest retail market in the world. With its unique “sell first, pay later” model, Peeba reduces inventory risks with cross-border payment solutions for retail businesses. Retailers across Asia can access high-quality products with lower costs from the platform’s curated catalog. During the pandemic when offline product-sourcing and trade shows have become impractical, this advantage opens a brand new and effective channel for retailers, especially small businesses, to buy products directly online. Peeba founder Jacky Lai has opened up to Headline and talked about how he sees the pain points in the supply chain, as well as how he turns them into business opportunities.

Peeba raised its US$4.2 million seed round led by Headline Asia in April 2022. “Communication and payment have been the biggest bottlenecks in expanding cross-border retail businesses,” said Headline Asia investor Abby Hsu, who was impressed by Peeba’s 10X user growth in the last year. “We are excited to see Peeba start bridging the local retailers to global brands via the cross-border wholesale solution and payment services,” said Hsu.

“Peeba brings the next stage of global retail innovations. The platform brings both the emerging and traditional brands to the world of local retailing in Asia. We are excited to become Peeba’s partner to help expand their reach into more markets in Asia,” Headline partner Akio Tanaka added.

What motivated you to start your company? What are the pain points you see in the market and how do you think Peeba can help?

Peeba was born from the earlier days in my career managing, while also experiencing the end-to-end processes of running a supply chain. One of the realizations that had dawned on me was that the supply chain industry was inefficient and hesitant to make changes. Retailers are often as a result beholden to gatekeepers that restrict access to select brands. While smaller brands may not have the resources to sell or trial their products in retail outlets until they reach a certain size. So we wanted to break down these barriers and give smaller retailers a chance — especially during the pandemic — to pivot their business or build a retail business from the ground up with reduced inventory risk. So we launched Peeba, which is APAC’s pioneering “Sell First, Pay Later” B2B wholesale marketplace, which connects unique brands from around the world and sells trendy goods, with SMB retailers in the APAC region.

What’s something you were wrong about when you started Peeba?

As with any business — including a B2B marketplace — starting Peeba was a whole lot easier said than done. On the surface, we’re connecting the supply of unique brands from around the world with the demand from consumers in the APAC region through SMB retailers, but under the hood, there’s just so much more going on. Before we could launch, we had to tackle issues revolving around managing inventory, and assessing the credit risk of retailers while striking partnerships with logistics providers to lower the cost of shipping for brands.

How do you connect brands with retailers with Peeba? What was something that frustrated you the most?

There’s more going on than meets the eye when connecting brands with retailers on a platform like Peeba. Because we have more than 100,000 products listed on our platform, we knew that to achieve scale, we’d need to develop our technology. And by technology, we mean our algorithms that enable us to use the sales data on our platform to forecast or predict which products would best sell in our retailers’ stores and consequently recommend these products to retailers. In addition, this enables us to determine which products or product categories to look for and source globally.

Can you share the story of how you met Headline Asia, and why you decided to work with us?

Meeting and eventually working with Headline Asia was a match that offered a win-win for both sides of the table. We first met Headline Asia through an introduction from one of our existing investors, Joe Chan, who is a managing partner at Mindworks. However, after our initial conversation, we were struck by how Headline Asia truly understood [wholesale businesses], the groundbreaking nature, and the potential global impact of this new B2B wholesale [business] model. Headline Asia, with its experience in e-commerce and logistics, truly aligned with our vision, which upends the traditional brand sourcing and retail model by lowering the barrier to entry for both the supply and demand sides of the equation.

Complete this sentence: “Few people know this about me, but…”

I was very shy as a kid.

What inspires you?

Throughout my career, I’ve sought to introduce completely new ways to impact society by ultimately building something that offers value to people. That passion has been extended to what we’ve developed with Peeba. In fact, Peeba has even been a lifeline or a low-risk solution for retailers that have been looking for a fresh start after the pandemic tore away their livelihoods as they can stock their shelves with inventory, but aren’t required to make any upfront payments or purchases to hold this inventory until it sells. The fact that we’re able to support our retailers in this manner is the value that I’ve strived to offer.

What are the markets you target? What’s next for you?

With the investment and Headline Asia at the helm of this fundraising round, we’re looking to the next stages to scale our business. We’re growing quickly and looking to expand Peeba across Asia by deepening our local operations in regions like Taiwan, Malaysia, and Japan through strategic hires. In addition, we’re also doubling down on our product team. This means we’ll have the resources to strengthen our retailers’ capabilities of sourcing unique products from around the world that consumers are likely to purchase.

Subscribe to our newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest Headline Asia news

FS002