Online retailer Shopclues said its valuation now stands at more than $1.1 billion (Rs 7,3000 crore), after it raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC.
The latest round of fund raising, which the company said was its last before going in for an initial public offering next year, saw participation from existing investors, including New York-based hedge fund Tiger Global Management and Nexus Venture Partners.
Shopclues joins a growing club of unicorns (unlisted firms with valuation of at least $1 billion).
Others in the list include Flipkart, Ola, Snapdeal, Paytm, MuSigma, InMobi, Zomato and Quikr.
Shopclues was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and renowned wall-street analyst Sandeep Aggarwal.
Mr Aggarwal bootstrapped the company with his own funds and angel money that he raised from his friends and family till the first institutional raise of $4 million in January 2012.
“As a long-term investor, GIC believes in the strong growth potential of India’s e-commerce industry. We are confident that Shopclues’ merchant-first mindset and solid management team will enable the company to expand its reach, especially in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities, bringing its unique value proposition to even more consumers and merchants,” Ravi Balasubramanian, GIC’s head of Asia Equities Research, said in a statement.
Shopclues said its gross merchandise value has grown over four times since January 2015 and the business is shipping out over 3.5 million items on a monthly basis, attracting a traffic of more than 100 million visits a month.
The business growth is accompanied by strong improvements in capital efficiency and expects to be profitable by first half of 2017, it said.
“Shopclues has consistently demonstrated that hyper-growth and strong business fundamentals are not mutually exclusive. The recent addition of GIC and the continued support from our existing investors is a validation of our capital efficiency with a clear path to profitability. This investment will enable us to double our focus on digitising our merchants’ businesses so that they scale to fully leverage the opportunity online commerce provides them,” Sanjay Sethi, CEO and co-founder, Shopclues, said.
The company will use the capital raised towards building and rolling out products to enable the SME merchants to digitise their business and to further entrench itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud.
“Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point and unstructured categories like lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic and automotive accessories. Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer and merchant network. We are confident that our capital efficiency and execution will make this our last fund raise before we become profitable with the eventual IPO in 2017,” Radhika Aggarwal, co-founder and chief business officer, Shopclues, said.
Others include Flipkart, Ola, Snapdeal, Paytm, MuSigma, InMobi, Zomato and Quikr
