Walmart-owned Flipkart has made a strategic investment in EasyRewardz, a CRM solutions company that also offers customer rewards programmes to its customers. This is reportedly a Series B funding for EasyRewardz. However, the exact amount invested by Flipkart has not been stated.
EasyRewardz is an Indian startup but has been able to expand to other markets as well, spread over South East Asia and the Middle East. The fresh fund infusion will be utilized towards making further inroads into these and other markets overseas.
The company believes that its CRM software is finding very good acceptability among customers and the smaller business seem to be keener to adopt these techniques to retain their existing customer base and to acquire newer ones. Flipkart may use this new association to build some CRM programmes for its customers too and the Walmart association can help EasyRewrdz access more geographies.
The global market for CRM software is being placed at around $48 billion. It is one of the fastest growing segments as well.
Eight-year old EasyRewardz has been co-founded by Soumya Chatterjee, Tejas Kadakia, Angad Singh and Sapan Kadakia. Customer engagement through rewards programmes is its key business besides offering SaaS solutions to companies interested in it. The company claims to have recorded a revenue of Rs 25 crore on an annualised basis. As for funding, its Series A fund raising came from investors led by Trans-Continental Venture Fund (TCVF) in 2017. The other key investors in the company are Venture Catalysts and some individual angels like Jitendra Gupta, Amrish Rau, Satyen Kothari, Ashneer Grover, Subrat Pani and others.
Flipkart says it packed up EasyRewardz to make an investment as part of its efforts at offering better experience to the customers on its online retail platform. In the Indian context, rival Amazon appears to have scored with its Prime offering which includes fast and free deliveries to the Prime customers and a subscription to video and music streaming.