AUSTRALIA’S biggest digital company is about to open its doors to Australian investors.
A company called Bitlife announced Wednesday it has completed the signing of a $50 million Series B funding round led by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The venture capital round was led by China-based CVC Group.AUSTRALIAN companies are looking to scale up their digital businesses in the face of growing competition from e-tailers and big players in China and overseas.
The big players like Alibaba, Amazon, Apple and Netflix have been investing heavily in their own e-tailing platforms.
Bitlife says its e-business has been a success.
The company has about 2,500 employees, but is seeking to grow to over 1,000 people by 2018.
The company will be a full-service company with online-only retail and e-health services, as well as services for e-learning and business collaboration.
Bitlife’s focus is to grow its ecommerce business to reach $1 billion in revenue and to grow that business in a rapidly growing Australian market, CEO and co-founder Justin Lee said.
“We believe in building the best customer experience, we’re a fast growing company, we’ve got the right people on the team and we’ve built a really smart team that is committed to doing this,” he said.
Lee said the startup was also working on building a marketplace for online businesses, adding that the marketplace would allow users to shop and sell products on Bitlife’s platform.
The new venture capital funding will be used to hire a head of sales and marketing and a marketing executive, and to build out an e-shop for Bitlife.
