E-commerce Startup Shop101 raises $11 million from Kalaari And Unilever Ventures

Shop101 will use the funds to hire more people in leadership roles and deepen its technology platform.
E-commerce Startup Shop101 raises $11 million from Kalaari And Unilever Ventures
E-commerce Startup Shop101 raises $11 million from Kalaari And Unilever Ventures
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Shop101 has raised funding as part of its Series B funding and the amount raised is $11 million. The major investors in this round are Kalaari Capital and Unilever Ventures. The ecommerce startup that fashions itself as more of a social platform, had just recently raised $5 million from a clutch of investors, Stellaris Venture Partners, Vy Capital, Raghunandan G (cofounder- TaxiForSure), and Livspace cofounder Ramakant Sharma.

The business model followed by Shop101 is a kind of a catalyst organization allowing individual entrepreneurs to sell stuff on their platform as well as enable them to take their offerings to sites like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The sellers can setup an online store within minutes with the technological backup provided by Shop101 and straightway take their products to their prospective customers. And it costs them next to nothing which is the startup’s USP.

The site has come as a boon to many first-time entrepreneurs, particularly with backgrounds like students, homemakers and the like. What’s more, they are provided with complete back-end support like storage, delivery and payments collection. Shop101 claims to have 300,000 entrepreneurs on its platform pan India.

The founders of this startup are Abhinav Jain and Aditya Gupta and having gone live in 2016, they seem to have done well for themselves and have raised a total funding of around $16 million so far. The current fund raise may be used for ramping up the employee count including at senior levels and expand the support systems.

There are encouraging reports on the future of online retailing in the country with Google and Boston Consulting Group indicating that of the 50 million registered small businesses in the country hardly 1 million are now selling online. This number is likely to increase to 10 million in a couple of years and the online retail trade by become a $60 billion segment during that time.

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