Helpr, one of Malaysia’s on-demand personal shopper services announced today that they're launching a brand new service called Giftr.

Dubbed "Malaysia's first gifting marketplace", Giftr makes it incredibly easy for users to discover, purchase, and send gifts to their loved ones all from a single place. 

With the aim of being more than just a website for gifts shopping, the team has masterfully crafted a whole new kind of gifting experience, making it incredibly interactive for gift senders to find the right gifts for the right occasions within the right budgets, all from one website. 

Giftr also comes with a messenger chatbot that makes the buying experience a whole lot more interactive when looking for gift recommendations. Users can then place bookings and set reminders for important moments just before their gifts are sent out.

"When we started out with Helpr, our goal was to be the go-to person whenever people need help to get any products or services, anytime and anywhere. Throughout the 2 years journey, we’ve received a lot of gifting related requests, thus we are building this new platform to provide gift seekers an easy way to browse and purchase gifts. With Giftr, we now hope to take our original mission of being everyone’s virtual assistant one step further to specialise on gifting vertical, by being there at their most important moments. Birthdays, anniversaries and so on. ”, mentioned Ang, founder of Giftr. 

Since it's soft launch in October 2016, Giftr has seen over 6x growth in total gross merchandise value, featuring more than 1200 assortments from over 90 gift sellers in Malaysia.

“We noticed that most of our users are looking for gifts, especially custom made gifts like flowers or cakes from individual sellers which only utilise Facebook or Instagram as sales channels. We are helping these sellers to set up their online store and list their products at zero fee. Our business model is based on shared success, where we only take a cut when sellers make money. “ mentioned Ang.

The launch of Giftr comes right after Helpr announced a fresh round of funding from SEGNEL Ventures, an investment firm based in Singapore that has also backed other startups such as Fave (previously KFit), Saltycustoms and many more.

"We believe that there is huge business opportunity by creating a product that provides seamless experience for users to place orders easily. Specializing on a niche vertical as a gifting marketplace helps to strengthen the company’s brand and aligned with company’s mission to help users to get anything they want with no hassle.", mentioned Hideki

Founder of SEGNEL Ventures, Hideki Fujita added that Helpr’s founders have the experience of scaling an e-commerce business throughout Asia-Pacific (APAC).

Aside from SEGNEL Ventures, Helpr is currently backed by 500 Startups, Yeoh Chen Chow (Co-founder of Fave) and several other angel investors. 

According to Ang, Giftr's mission is simple, and that is to provide a gifting-first experience to gift seekers to help improve relationships with their loved ones. Although the team is presently only operating in Malaysia currently, they have plans to scale the business regionally by the end of the year.