Semantics3, an e-commerce data analytics startup, raises USD 1.5 million from existing investors
There are e-commerce players and then there are price comparison engines, which are universally hated by e-commerce players and loved by customers everywhere. These sites display all types of impressive numbers, such as a catalogue of over two million products or 100K merchants on board. Making sense of so much data is a huge task in itself. Singapore-based semantics3 is working hard to solve this problem.
The biggest challenge faced by merchants is not the fact that they do not have enough data, but how to make sense of that data. Semantics3 is trying to solve this problem for merchants with their product search API approach to make developers’ life easy. Recently, the company raised a bridge round of USD 1.5 million from its existing investors E-Merge and Zillionize. Both funds had invested around USD 600K in Semantics3 upon their graduation from Y Combinator. Till date the company has raised about USD 2.15 million in seed rounds. Vinoth Gopinathan, Co-Founder Semantics3, said,
We are looking to use majority of the funds to expand our Indian operations and hire more sales staff and engineers in India. This is still a seed round post our YC funding. And will be used for growth as we gear up for future rounds.
The company was founded by classmates Sivamani Varun, Govind Chandrasekhar, and Vinoth Gopinathan at National University of Singapore, along with Shawn Tan and Srinivas Kidambi. The company got accepted to the winter batch of Y Combinator in 2013. It was the first Singapore company to be accepted into Y Combinator. After graduating from Y Combinator, the company saw great interest in US and started focussing on the US market. They have started looking at India and started the Bangalore office in 2014.
What Semantics3 does?
Semantics3 crawls through the web to locate data in e-commerce websites and collects data to provide a robust product search API to developers and merchants who can make use of this database. They have created databases that aim to track every product sold online.
Currently, their free plan option allows developers to make 500 API calls per day limited to 100 products (push notification). Their basic plan for startups (US $749 per month) permits developers 25,000 API calls/day for push notifications for up to 2,500 products, while the growth plan ($1499 per month) permits unlimited API calls/day and push notification for up to 10,000 products.
The API helps developers to use these datasets for different purposes, including building price comparison engines or even affiliate e-commerce stores. The API gives developers and merchants access to product data, including name, price, brand, model, color, size, UPC code, images, dimensions (width, height and length), weight, purchase links, search and filtering on all the parameters above.
Competitors
One of the biggest competitors of Semantics3 is Indix, a company based in Seattle and has operations in Chennai as well. Indix offers a catalog of 800+ million products from all across the web.