Appboxo has raised $7 million to help any app become a great app.

 Appboxo has raised $7 million to help any app become a great app.

Mini-apps are little applications that operate within a bigger app and provide extra ways for users to interact with it and earn money. "Super applications" like WeChat, Alibaba, and Grab promoted them. However, not all coders have access to the same resources as these IT behemoths. Appboxo, based in Singapore, aims to level the playing field. The startup's technology allows developers to transform their applications into super apps by creating their own mini-apps or accessing them through Appboxo Showroom, a third-party developer marketplace.

GCash, Paytm, and VodaPay are among Appboxo's clients. The company announced today that it has secured $7 million in Series A investment led by RTP Global. Antler and 500 Southeast Asia were among the first supporters, as were SciFi VC, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused startup fund), and angel investors Huey Lin and Kayvon Deldar.

Kaniyet Rayev, the company's CEO, and Nursultan Keneshbekov, the company's CTO, launched Appboxo in 2019. When it announced its seed investment in December 2020, TechCrunch was the first to report on it. More than 400 mini-app integrations, the most of which are made by third-party developers, are powered by the firm, which is presently utilized by ten super applications spanning Southeast Asia, India, and South Africa. According to the corporation, it has a combined user base of more than 500 million people.

The company's major products are two. Miniapp is the first, a SaaS platform that includes SDKs and APIs for creating and launching mini-apps. Mini-apps for food delivery, shopping, and restaurant bookings, for example, can be integrated into mobile wallets.

The second, Shopboxo, was created approximately a year ago and allows businesses to create personalized web storefronts in less than 30 seconds using mobile devices.

Then, using Appboxo, mini-apps created with Shopboxo can be integrated into super apps, and Rayev anticipates that being able to reach a larger merchant base of SMEs will "scale the number of mini-apps into the thousands this year," especially since Appboxo's clients already use the platform primarily for e-commerce. "Financial super apps want to expand into other verticals, and e-commerce appears to be the most apparent possibility and the easiest to implement in the present context."