Manila, Philippines – Karen Yang Chiang, formerly of local fintech GCash, has joined local parenting-focused ecommerce platform as its new chief technology officer. In her new role, Chiang will manage the company’s product, engineering and project delivery teams.

She will also focus on developing the technology, architecture and scalability to support the company’s evolution into an online-to-offline (O2O) parenting ecosystem spanning integrated commerce, content and community experiences.

Chiang previously served as the head of enterprise architecture, strategy and innovation for Mynt, GCash’s parent company.

Speaking on her new role, Chiang said, “I am very honoured and excited to embark on this journey with the edamama team. I look forward to building the next evolution of our platform, enabling us to continuously provide trusted and innovative products and services for our customers.”

Meanwhile, Bela Gupta and Nishant D’Souza, founders at edamama, commented, “Underpinning our mission to help parents simplify decision-making is a customer centric platform built on a robust technology stack. We’re thrilled to welcome Karen to our leadership team to bring our product and engineering roadmap to new heights as we build a leading omnichannel brand.” 

They added, “Karen’s track record of scaling start-ups, along with passion for the customer as a mother of three, makes her a true growth partner to us as founders, and an inspiration to all women in technology.”

Since its launch in 2020, edamama has raised a total of US$25M in funding from leading strategic, financial and angel investors, including Alpha JWC Ventures, Gentree Fund, Robinsons Retail Holdings, Kickstart Ventures, Innoven Capital, and Foxmont Capital Partners. 

Manila, Philippines – Coming fresh from its recently-concluded pre-series A funding, local mom-centric e-commerce platform edamama has reached US$5m in total, which will be used in the company’s new endeavors in automation, product development, and innovations, as well as the company’s warehouse and logistics operations. 

Said investment round was led by venture capital Gentree Fund, together with Foxmont Capital Partners, Robinsons Retail, and Kickstart Ventures, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of local telco Globe Telecom. 

Edamama was established amid the pandemic by its founder Bela Gupta D’Souza, alongside her husband Nishant, to address the issue of quality, as well as the other challenges common among today’s e-commerce platforms, such as channel fragmentation, non-established brand trust, the lack of a discovery-led buying experience, and poor customer service. 

Furthermore, D’Souza also found pain points of mothers as consumers when purchasing online. She said that it is common for mothers to spend many hours in search of the best products for their children only to end up with mediocre items that have the inferior quality from untrusted sources.

“E-commerce is a scale game and we’re very excited about scaling up. Our goal is to continue being vertically focused, so we could gain and build the trust of more mothers in the country,” she said.

Edamama services mothers nationwide, although it acknowledges the need for further upgrades on its logistics operations to cope with the increase in orders coming from all over the country. It hopes to use part of the funds raised to expand its warehouse capabilities and further improve its delivery services for customers to receive their goods more quickly.

Apart from this, the company is also working on omnichannel expansion and providing new mediums of direct-to-consumer communication, such as selling through a live stream.

In addition, there are many features within the platform including ‘Gift Registry’ for creating gift wish lists for special occasions, ‘Subscribe and Save’ which is an online diaper subscription service, and ‘Explore’ which is a one-stop destination to book online events and activities for children.

“The edamama team constantly works towards creating innovative features for moms to use, staying true to their mission of simplifying decision-making and reimagining online shopping for mothers,” the company said in a press statement.