ShopClues raises Series E at a valuation of $1.1 Billion

ShopClues.com, the mass-market online retailer founded in 2011 by renowned wall-street analyst Sandeep Aggarwal, has received an undisclosed amount of funding in its Series E round.

This funding has brought the retailer’s valuation at more than $1.1Billion.

The round of capital infusion was led by GIC, which happens to be the largest sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. Existing investors of ShopClues.com, including major names like Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners, also participated in this funding round.

“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,” said Ravi Balasubramanian, GIC’s Head of Asia Equities Research.

Sanjay Sethi, CEO & Co-founder of ShopClues, had his two cents to share on the same. “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 digitizing our merchants’ businesses so that they scale to fully leverage the opportunity online commerce provides them.”

The gross merchandise volume (GMV) of online retailer has grown over four time since January 2015. They are currently shipping out over 3.5 million items on a monthly basis, thereby attracting more than 100 million visits per month.

The business growth, which is accompanied by strong improvements in capital efficiency, is expected to prove profitable by H1 2017.
“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,” said Radhika Aggarwal, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer of ShopClues.

The capital raised in this funding round will be used to focus on building and rolling out new products so that SME merchants can be enabled to digitize their businesses. It would also be used to further establish itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud.

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