The round was led by 640 Oxford Ventures, with participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India.
Dukaan, the online retail platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products, today announced it has secured $11M in a Pre Series A round of funding.
The round was led by 640 Oxford Ventures, with participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India. Venture Catalyst and new venture firms HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns and a number of high-profile executives also participated in the funding round, including Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Carl Pei, Co-founder and the CEO of Nothing.
Since its launch in June 2020, Dukaan has facilitated over 1.5 million transactions and a new store is being created every 2 minutes.
“We founded Dukaan because we saw small businesses and first-time entrepreneurs struggling to digitize and make their presence online. We became obsessed with the idea of making the most affordable, easy-to-use, mobile-first commerce platform in the world.” Said Suumit Shah CEO and Co-founder, Dukaan.
“This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base. We started with our monetization journey on a small merchant base last quarter, and more than 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far. Premium subscription is just one of the revenue streams, which contributes ~10% to our revenues,” he added.
640 Oxford Ventures commented: “Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMB’s need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products . We are thrilled to partner with Suumit and the Dukaan team on their path to becoming a generational company.”
Akshay Bhushan, Partner, Lightspeed commented: “There is a massive white space opportunity to service the commerce needs of India’s 100M+ small businesses and the Dukaan team with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user is ideally positioned to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses in India.” Founded in June 2020 by Suumit Shah and Subhash Choudhary, Dukaan is a no-code platform that makes it easier for anyone to launch an ecommerce website in a few minutes and scale it on the internet. Each e-commerce website powered by Dukaan is customizable in terms of design and functionality. In addition to that, Dukaan merchants can link their UPI ID with Dukaan and start accepting payments via Credit Card, Debit Card, UPI and Wallet from the end customers.
Rajinder Balaraman, Director, Matrix India commented: “Small businesses are digitizing faster than ever in India’s history and Dukaan’s simple yet effective SaaS product has struck a chord with these customers and enables them to grow their business online. We wish Suumit, Subhash and the Dukaan team great success in their journey ahead.”
Source: Business World
