Una Brands was founded in 2020 by Kiren Tanna, the former CEO of Rocket Internet Asia and founder of foodpanda and ZEN Rooms.
The company has four other co-founders: Adrian Johnston, Kushal Patel, Tobias Heusch and Srinivasan Shridharan. The founding team’s experience spans e-commerce, operations, data analytics, private equity and investment banking.
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Una Brands will focus on acquiring companies with strong independent branding that have annual revenue between US$300,000 and US$20 million.
According to a press release on May 6, the company is platform agnostic, acquiring businesses across leading e-commerce platforms including Amazon, Lazada, Shopee and Shopify. The company claims to be able to complete the end-to-end transaction process in under five weeks.
Tanna sees enormous potential for growth in the region. “We estimate that there are more than 10 million third-party sellers on regional platforms across Asia Pacific... The Covid-19 lockdowns encouraged many people to try shopping online for the first time and has created a behavioural shift in consumer habits.”
Khailee Ng, managing partner at 500 Startups, believes Una Brand can be a global leader in e-commerce. “They are experienced, mature co-founders with a track record in creating speed, scale and success. Kiren and his team have the right approach, there is a huge and growing e-commerce market in Asia Pacific and there is a huge opportunity for consolidation and optimisation.”
