<article><a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.senjogroup.com/" target="_blank">Senjō Group</a>, a global payments operator and fintech investment firm, is investing $1.2 million and an additional $20 million trade finance in <a style="color: #000080;" href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/13228735?" target="_blank">Tjaara Pte. Ltd</a>, a Singapore-based B2B service.</article>

<a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.senjogroup.com/" target="_blank">Senjō Group</a>, a global payments operator and fintech investment firm, is investing $1.2 million and an additional $20 million trade finance in <a style="color: #000080;" href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/13228735?" target="_blank">Tjaara Pte. Ltd</a>, a Singapore-based B2B service.
Tjaara or “Marketplace” in Arabic &#8211; incorporated in August 2016 &#8211; uses a group buy concept to aggregate demand from customers to present a large consolidated order to pre-qualified manufacturers.
Tjaara acts as a global purchaser to numerous unaligned wholesalers and businesses in the market, aiding the process through negotiating, performing quality control checks from factory to port and acting as an escrow service to manage the complicated buying process between Chinese manufacturers and foreign companies.
Currently invite-only, the platform is only usable by vetted channel partners, who can view translated listings or request for a search for products.The company says that it will soft launch its service in Q1 2017, with plans for a full launch in Q3 2017. Its initial market focus will be on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
Singapore-headquartered Senjō Group comprises five business units: Senjō Payments, Senjō Commerce, Senjō Ventures, Senjō Trading, and Senjō Finance. As such, this is a complementary investment that synchronises with the firms existing business operations.
Elaborating on its origins, Fred Then, co-founder of Tjaara, says: “Tjaara is a B2B service that offers product search, language translation support, ordering, logistics and finance management. We realised that a lot of smaller and medium-sized retailers were unable to navigate Mandarin-only manufacturer listings or access factory-direct prices.&#8221;
He adds, &#8220;Tjaara was built to help our end-users unlock a larger variety of products and larger profit margins through economies-of-scale. Unlike typical agents, Tjaara is also able to assist with product evaluation by obtaining samples for end-users; this is possible because of our close relationship with manufacturers.”
According to Then, Chinese wholesale e-commerce platforms like Alibaba offer lower prices for local purchases but inflate prices when non-Chinese IP addresses are detected. Due to this, Tjaara leverages on its Chinese operations to secure better pricing, as well as consolidating the orders of small wholesalers to gain bulk discounts.
Commenting on the investment, Sam Evans, VP (Business Development) and Head of Ventures, Senjō Group, said,“Tjaara is well-placed as a business to make it through less-than-ideal economic times, for instance when global demands are falling. More than ever, SMEs will need means of cost savings, and wouldn’t it be even better if these don’t impact product quality? It was in this that we saw great potential in Tjaara, and realised that they were aligned with our core business objective of addressing market inefficiencies.”
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Senjo Group has invested $1.2m in B2B services firm Tjaara.

Senjo Group invests $1.2m in Singapore enterprise customer aggregator Tjaara

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Senjo Group invests $1.2m in Singapore enterprise customer aggregator Tjaara

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