D2C Solutions Provider Fastlane Closes Nearly $10 Million in Series A Financing
Fastlane Technology, a global direct-to-consumer (D2C) solutions provider, announced its securing of Series A funding totaling nearly $10 million in investment capital led by Baidu Ventures and South-Korea based LB Investment.
Established in 2018, Fastlane is a full-service D2C solutions provider for brands looking to expand overseas, through cross-border e-commerce and locally. It is committed to providing brand strategy, marketing communication, official website development, digital operations, order fulfillment, business localization and other services that facilitate the global expansion of innovative brands. The firm’s annual growth rate from 2018 to 2020 is more than 500%, and the GMV in 2020 exceeded $100 million.
In 2019, the company became the first Shopify Plus partner since the establishment of the Shopify China team. Since its creation in 2018, Fastlane has built a strong portfolio of clients across various industries, from consumer electronics to lifestyle products such as ZTE, RELX, Xiaomi, Roborock and Xpeng, successfully helping them develop localized operations in markets such as Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, it also started collaborating with global innovative brands such as London-based consumer technology company Nothing.
Despite recent troubles with the global supply chain, Chinese innovative brands are accelerating their D2C efforts to sustain growth overseas. According to official data, China gathers more than 600,000 cross-border e-commerce related companies, with an increase of 42,000 new companies in 2021. The scale of China’s export cross-border e-commerce transactions has been rising by 30% annually, and it is expected that cross-border e-commerce transactions will top $3 trillion in 2022.
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Although the global popularity of Chinese brands continues to rise, they still face many challenges. “In recent years, a large number of small- and medium-sized brand merchants who have gone overseas generally face a lack of professional talent, weak insight into the local market, and difficulty in coverage. With regional sales and contract fulfillment networks, a lack of understanding of local laws and regulations and other issues, the road to global markets still has great uncertainty,” says Fastlane co-founder and CEO Lucas Liao.
Under this background, Fastlane aims to serve innovative companies with strong product capabilities to provide a global one-stop solution from 0 to 1.