MUMBAI: Online retailer ShopClues.com that led the adoption of the marketplace model in India received an undisclosed amount of funding in its Series E round. With this deal, ShopClues’ valuation stands at more than $1.1 billion. The round of capital infusion is being led by GIC, the largest sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. Existing investors, including Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners, have also participated in this round of funding.
GIC’s head of Asia Equities research Ravi Balasubramanian said, “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 mind-set 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.”
ShopClues CEO and co-founder Sanjay Sethi added, “ShopClues has consistently demonstrated that hyper-growth and strong business fundamentals are not mutually exclusive. The recent addition of GIC and the continued strong 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.”
The capital raised will be used to focus on building and rolling out new products to enable the SME merchants to digitise their business and to further entrench itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud.
ShopClues co-founder and chief business officer Radhika Aggarwal said, “Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point & unstructured categories like lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic & automotive accessories etc. Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer & merchant network. We are confident that our capital efficiency & execution will make this our last fund raise before we become profitable with the eventual IPO in 2017.”
