The infusion of new funds will be used for expanding the Community leader network in Tier 3/4 cities, scaling technology, building supply of small regional brands & creating a suite of D2C branded products to address the unfulfilled aspiration of these customers
National, 20 January, 2021: ShopG, A social commerce platform, announced the closure of its seed round of USD 1.5Mn from Orios Venture Partners & RPSG Ventures, India’s leading early-stage venture capital funds. Angel investors like Rajesh Yabaji – CEO Blackbuck, Raghunandan G – Ex CEO Taxi for Sure, Prasanth Nair- Ex Flipkart, Alibaba also participated in the round.
Started in Nov 2019, ShopG has built a social commerce- platform powered by micro-entrepreneur community leaders that is changing the way the next 500 million customers beyond India’s top cities shop for their daily household needs.
ShopG was founded by Ankur Arora, Abhishek Mishra, Pranay Suwalka and Yogesh Nehra, alumni of IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur & ISB with past experience in building & scaling startups like Cleartax, OLA, Rivigo, Delhivery.
Commenting on the fund-raise, Ankur Arora & Abhishek Mishra , Co-Founders, ShopG said, “ Next 500 mn internet customers, from Tier3/4 cities of India, who earn an average household income of Rs. 25000-30000 per month, prefer assisted buying from someone they trust and have low Average Order Values Rs 250; making it impossible for existing E-commerce 1.0 players like Amazon, Flipkart etc to service them with high customer acquisition, & supply chain costs.
Our network of community leaders who are mostly women, inspire trust as well as serve them at Zero Customer Acquisition Cost and 10X better supply chain. ShopG partners with regional / small brands that offer good quality products, but have had limited distribution reach. These products are made available and aware to customers via the community leaders at great bargains”
“Social commerce is currently at $1.5bn – $2bn in India and will scale to $25bn by 2025 or earlier on the back of smartphone ownership that has crossed 500mn in 2020 accelerated by COVID. Most of this growth has come in Tier 3 cities like Solapur, Bareilly or a Tumkur. In China, social commerce makes up nearly 12% of retail and has created 4 unicorns over the last 5 years with more than 20 funded companies. The growth took off with growing smartphone penetration which is bound to happen in India as well. Daily household needs comprise the largest chunk of this. We are excited to partner with the ShopG team which has developed a profitable model bringing the power of micro-entrepreneurs, digital-ready customers and tailored set of small brands including their own, on a common tech platform,” said Anup Jain, Managing Partner, Orios Venture Partners.
With industry leading unit economics, ShopG is now looking at an aggressive scale in 300+ cities in the next 3 years
Source: Business World
