Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Gurugram-based e-commerce platform ShopClues has raised ₹110 crores ($16 million) from its existing investors including private equity investment firm Matrix Partners, Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC Private Limited, along with Ronnie Scewvala‘s Unilazer Ventures, according to a company executive.

Since ShopClues last raised $100-140 million from GIC in January 2016, it has been having a hard time getting investors to shell out money. It took to debt financing route to pick up another ₹50 crores from InnoVen Capital in May 2017. While it raised a meagre $1 million from Unilazer Ventures in February this year.

ShopeClues has had talks with every major company in the market including Flipkart, Paytm Mall, Snapdeal, according to people familiar with the development. Although the reports of a merger were denied by ShopeClues co-founder Radhika Aggarwal.

With speculations running wild about the future of the startup and investors shying away from putting in money as its daily sales dwindled, this investment is set to bring some relief to the startup.

In another positive development for ShopeClues, its founder and CEO Sanjay Sethi in a letter to its employees claimed that with its current growth trajectory, ShopClues will break even by Diwali this year. The startup was burning $5.5 million a month in 2017, while it has now brought it down to only $500,000 a month.

In a blog post, Sethi had claimed that the startup had upped its revenue from $28 million in 2017 to $48 million this year. Also, without giving the previous figures, he said that the losses have reduced to $31 million for this year.

Clearing the air surrounding the future of ShopClues, Sethi in the email to employees had confirmed a deal with Middle East’s biggest mall operator to enable their O2O retail, as monetization efforts bear fruit. He also added that a similar deal with a domestic offline retailer is set to be closed soon.

While ShopClues might have navigated the troubled waters, for now, it’s e-commerce business still competes with the giants in the Indian e-commerce market including Flipkart and Amazon.

By Varun

Startups | Books | Ideas

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