In September 2025, Puma Growth Partners invested £5 million as part of a larger £8.25 million Series A investment round into YASO.

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.

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[1].

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 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.

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.

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.

Clients include Cowshed, Pixi Beauty and Nip + Fab, brands that would typically be stocked in UK high street stores including Boots, Holland & Barrett and Waitrose.

Source: [1] Capital One – Online Shopping Statistics by Country