Currently focused on beauty and wellness, the startup’s ultimate goal is to expand into more verticals and create a suite of backend software

In many Southeast Asian markets, social commerce sellers are making up an increasingly large portion of e-commerce. In fact, according to a recent Bain report, social commerce accounted for 65% of Vietnam’s $22 billion online retail economy last year.

Despite their combined retailing power, many social commerce sellers cannot buy in bulk directly from brands. Instead, they rely on wholesale aggregators, but that means they may not be able to trace the provenance of their products, said Aemi co-founder and CEO Kim Vu.

Aemi was created with CTO Hieu Nguyen to help solve social commerce seller’s supply chain issues. By working with hundreds of social commerce sellers, it is able to buy directly from brands.  Because Aemi works with hundreds of sellers, it has the purchasing power to negotiate lower wholesale prices than individual sellers, while at the same time guaranteeing the provenance of products.

Currently focused on beauty and wellness, the startup’s ultimate goal is to expand into more verticals and create a suite of backend software that will help sellers manage inventory, ordering and payment.

The startup has raised $2 million in funding from Alpha JWC Ventures and January Capital, with participation from Venturra Discovery, FEBE Ventures and angel investors. Funding is being used for hiring, especially for product engineers to build software for Aemi’s micro-merchants.

The social commerce sellers Aemi works with are typically micro-influencers, with follower counts of about 10,000 to 30,000. Vu told TechCrunch one of the reasons she wanted to start Aemi was because she’s a social commerce enthusiast.

I love buying on social commerce, Facebook stores, Instagram shops and the like, because I trust the person, so I trust that they have done a really good job at breaking down the products and reviews from a content perspective, said Vu.

I see a huge demand from a consumer standpoint, but also from a supply perspective, said Vu. Not too much effort has been put into growing supply chain support for this sector.