Social e-commerce start-up DealShare, known for pioneering the community group buying (CGB) model in India, has raised $144 million in Series D funding.
The round led by Tiger Global was co-led by WestBridge Capital, Alpha Wave Incubation (a venture fund backed by ADQ, and managed by Falcon Edge Capital) and Z3Partners with participation from Partners of DST Global, Matrix Partners India, and Alteria Capital. This transaction marks the third funding for the company in a span of seven months, with the valuation increasing nine-fold to $455 million within two-and-a-half years, on the back of high growth momentum. With the current round, the total funding raised by DealShare stands at $183 million.
DealShare has built a new disruptive retail model for India with a focus on the affordability and price component for mass consumers targeting middle and lower income groups. It procures products from local manufacturers and provides them with a platform to digitise their business and compete with national brands. It offers high quality, low-priced essentials coupled with a gamified, fun and virality-driven vernacular shopping experience that makes it easy for first-time internet users to experience online shopping.
Founded by Vineet Rao, Sourjyendu Medda, Sankar Bora and Rajat Shikhar, DealShare provides a sharp and curated assortment at highly competitive prices and has built an innovative community leader-driven ultra-low-cost delivery mechanism collectively leading to best-in-class unit economics.
“We believe India is a unique market with its highly diverse demographics and requires an indigenous model that is built based on first principles and differentiates itself from western and Chinese e-commerce models. DealShare has pioneered this model with innovations in app experience and technology, direct from factory procurement, gamified and viral demand generation and building a DealShare dost (community leader) network that enables DealShare to operate at the lowest cost operations in the world,” said Vineet Rao, CEO and founder, DealShare.
Fund deployment
The funds will be utilised to invest in AI-driven innovations in user experience, to scale up operations and increase footprint from 20 warehouses across 5 States to over 200 warehouses across 10 States by the year-end. DealShare caters to about 1 lakh orders daily and has partnered with over 1,000 local and regional brands.
“In FY 2021, we grew 5X to reach $200 million annual GMV run rate. In a short span of 2 years, we have serviced more than 3 million consumers and over 20 million orders. We are confident of hitting a $1 billion GMV run rate by the end of the year, thereby, building a strong 10 million customer base. We currently serve 40 cities and towns across 5 States and will increase our footprint to 100 cities/towns and 10 States by year-end. We are also close to breaking even,” Sourjyendu Medda, founder, Chief Business Officer and CFO, DealShare told BusinessLine.