YASO secures £8m Series A led by Puma Growth Partners to expand its operating system for global brands in China

YASO, the operating system that enables global consumer brands to grow in the Chinese market, has raised £8.25m million in a Series A investment round led by Puma Growth Partners, a leading provider of growth capital to scale-up businesses.

The round also saw participation from new and existing investors including Guinness Ventures, Playfair Capital, Koro Capital, Haatch Ventures, Sequel, Portfolio Ventures, Nodes, and Founders Capital.

China is the world's largest e-commerce market, accounting for over 50% of global e-commerce sales, growing from $2.1 trillion in 2020 to $2.5 trillion in 2025 and expected to grow to $3.5 trillion by 2030.

Global consumer brands face several challenges when entering the Chinese market. The rapid growth of the social and e-commerce market has led to the emergence of multiple platforms, each with its own technical infrastructure. This fragmentation requires brands to either adopt new systems or partner with local distributors which can result in complicated cross-platform selling, high entry costs, limited data visibility and the need to relinquish control over brand positioning.

YASO enables Brands to scale quickly in the market without the need for local partners or their own infrastructure. Their technology is end-to-end, covering payments, logistics, compliance, tax, analytics and storefront integrations. This allows brands to integrate with, and sell through, the main social commerce and e-commerce platforms in China like Douyin (Chinese TikTok), Tmall (China’s Amazon) and RedNote (China’s Instagram).

The investment will support YASO in scaling its sales and marketing function, accelerate onboarding of new clients, expand its platform capability and increase operational capacity.

The business was founded in 2022 by entrepreneurs Jonny Plein, James Campbell and Adam Knight. The founders have extensive experience in both founding businesses and the Chinese market including being fluent speakers of Mandarin. YASO now has a team of 20, combining a unique mix of China market experts, technologists and startup founders. The business is headquartered in London and Shanghai.

We couldn’t be happier to be partnering with Puma on this opportunity. We have the team, the tech, the market size and therefore the opportunity to build a $bn business helping brands launch and scale in the world’s largest ecommerce market. We needed an investor who matched YASO’s ambitions, and we have found that in Puma. We are also delighted with the other co-investors, including the Seed investors, both VCs and Angels, who have been there since day 1, who backed us again in this round. We can’t wait to take YASO to the next level!

Jonny Plein, Co-founder

We are delighted to be backing the YASO team who are truly redefining how international brands navigate China’s complex e-commerce and social commerce landscape. The founding team’s deep expertise in Chinese commerce, combined with a mature product ready to scale, makes this a compelling opportunity for us. We’re excited to lead this round alongside fantastic co-investors and we look forward to helping accelerate YASO’s growth.

Ben Leslie, Investor at Puma Growth Partners

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