Online marketplace, Shop101 has raised $5 million in series A funding led by Stellaris Venture Partners.
Existing investors including Vy Capital, TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G. and Ramakant Sharma, Livspace co-founder also participated in the round. As a part of the investment, Rahul Chowdhri, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners has joined the company board.
Shop101, which enables entrepreneurs to sell online using Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, plans to utilise the capital to strengthen its core leadership and product team, scale the supplier network and enhance its technology platform.
“We are very excited to partner with Abhinav (Jain), Aditya (Gupta) and their exceptional team in their journey to build India’s first social selling platform,” said Chowdhri.
According to a joint report by Google and KPMG (2017), small and medium businesses going online could boost the country’s growth by 10 percentage points to 46-48% by 2020. The Mumbai-based startup claims to have already empowered 300,000 entrepreneurs and currently has 100,000 applications download on Playstore.
“Our vision is to democratize e-commerce by empowering entrepreneurs and small merchants to launch their own online store as well as sell on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and other social channels with a few clicks. We have grown 25-30% month on month over the last couple of years” said Abhinav Jain, co-founder and chief executive officer, Shop101.
Source: Mint