BackCrownit parent raises funds from Freecharge, Freshdesk founders
Launched in July 2014, Crownit has seen widespread growth across four cities including Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore
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Delhi: GoldVIP Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd., which runs the Crownit mobile application, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon (founders, Freecharge), Girish Mathrubootham (founder, Freshdesk) and Anand Chandrasekaran (former chief product officer, Snapdeal), the company said in a statement on Friday.
The company plans to use the funds for expanding to more cities and increase merchant partnerships.
Previously, the company raised $5.5 million from Accel Partners and Helion venture Partners in May 2015. Prior to that, the company had raised early-stage funds from individual investors in 2014.
Gurgaon-based GoldVIP, founded in 2014 by Sameer Grover, is an online-to-offline (O2O) mobile application connecting consumers with local merchants.
Crownit offers its users cash back deals at local merchants. Customers can also get cash back by shopping online, book movie tickets and pay their bills.
“We (Crownit) are replicating the success of Meituan (China’s largest offline deals company) in India. We will continue to scale using product innovation without the need of large capital. Kunal, Sandeep, Girish and Anand acknowledge Crownit’s product focused approach and we will continue to build on that," Grover said in a statement.
Currently operational in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, Crownit has over 900,000 users and 15,000 merchants listed on its portal across food and beverage, health and wellness and beauty. The company is aiming for 20 million users and $1.2 billion of annual gross merchandise value across 25 cities in India by 2019, it said.
Gross merchandise value is the aggregate value of products and services purchased by the users.
“Crownit has built a sustainable marketing program for offline merchants. The consumer engagement of Crownit has proven that the product really works and has wide acceptance. At scale across 25 cities and 50,000 merchants it will work beautifully." Shah said in a company statement.
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