Pastel, a startup that provides software and apps to assist retailers with their bookkeeping and sales tracking processes, is announcing a seed raise of $5.5 million led by Pan-African venture capital firm TLcom Capital. Other VC firms such as Global Founders Capital (GFC), Golden Palm Investments, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play and Soma Cap also participated in the seed round.
Reversso, a company that offers B2B software to improve returns and exchanges on e-commerce sites, raised US$1.1 million in a seed round led by the Santiago, Chile-based Genesis Ventures fund. Reversso was born after they noticed the difficulties in the process of returns and exchanges of merchandise in the e-commerce of their previous jobs. By automating the exchange process, Reversso suggests other products based on the user’s search history on the website. In addition, returns are streamlined, allowing the store to make refunds instantly.
Egyptian startup Convertedin, a marketing operating system for e-commerce brands, has raised a US$3 million seed funding round to help it expand across MENA and Latin America. Convertedin is built for brands and businesses who desire a single platform to drive personalized and scalable campaigns, convert customers, achieve measurable results and grow revenue.
There’s probably no limit to Amazon’s greed – because capitalism – but there are constraints as governments regulate BigTech more aggressively and, just maybe, the free market works its wonders. Amazon cited “seller sentiment related to the fee” in its statement pulling back from its planned 2% fee on sellers who don’t use its Prime fulfillment services. But looming antitrust cases likely had something to do with it.