The Indian ECommerce Funding machine keeps buzzing – This time the beneficiary is 3 year old Indian marketplace ShopClues. Tiger Global, which is already overweight in Ecommerce space with their big investments in Flipkart, Myntra, Quikr among others, has pumped in $100 million in ShopClues. According to ET report, the deal values ShopClues at $350 million, which means Tiger Global has picked up about 28.5 percent stake in the company!
According to Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Shopclues, “We will be investing money in technology, marketing and everything else that will enable more sellers to come on our platform”
ShopClues was founded in the Silicon Valley in June 2011 and began India operations on January 2012. It was founded by IIT Alumnus Sanjay Sethi and Radhika Agarwal with the vision to provide small and medium businesses a level playing field to compete with more organized retail in the country.
This is ShopClues’ fourth round of funding. They first raised angel funding from clutch of individual investors that included employees of companies like Google, Netscape and many serial entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. The company had raised their Series A of $4 million in Feb 2012 led by Nexus Ventures Partners. In March 2013, they raised Series B round of $10 million from Helion Venture partners, Nexus Partners along with Teruhide Sato. With this latest round of funding, ShopClues has raised a total of $115 million.
Although a marketplace, Shopclues is slightly different likes of Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. They want to focus on unstructured, mass market, high-margin product categories. Also, Shopclues’ focus is more on unbranded items rather than branded products. They are also targeting masses from Tier II and Tier III town rather than metro’s and tier I cities.
Shopclues currently has over 100,000 sellers on their platform and want to ramp up this number to 300,000 by end of this year. Compared to top 3 players, who have crossed Billion dollar GMV (Gross Merchandize Value), Shopclues plans to close this fiscal with a GMV of 2,000 crore (approx 325 Million).
[…] has raised their Series C funding of $100 million from leading ecommerce investor in India, Tiger Global. This funding round pegs their valuation at […]