Chinese e-tailer Club Factory on Friday raised $100 million in a Series D round of financing led by leading venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners and other top investors including Bertelsmann, IDG Capital, and other Fortune 500 companies from the US and Asia.
Global markets, especially India, has become a major focus of attention for Club Factory.
According to app download and usage data from App Annie, Club Factory surpassed Snapdeal in terms of monthly active users on Android, to rank among the third largest e-commerce shopping apps in India, next to Amazon and Flipkart.
Club Factory aims to further enhance its platform after this new round of funding by expanding its range of products to deliver more offerings in different categories. It will also use the funds to attract more local sellers and enhance its data technology capability to make Indian retail more efficient, the company said in a statement.
Over the past two years, Club Factory has continued to build a global company with its technical capabilities and global vision. The company says it has achieved more than 10 times growth in the past six months for its Indian SME business. The rapid growth is primarily due to its zero-commission strategy, where the sellers are able to transfer the cost-benefit to the users. In addition to more localized user operations and marketing, Club Factory’s vision of ‘building the ecosystem for the Indian Sellers’ has worked well, making it one of India's largest online sales channels.
Talking about the announcement, Club Factory Founder and CEO Vincent Lou said: “Club Factory offers local sellers 0% commission marketplace platform, and any legally qualified Indian seller can sell on Club Factory. At the same time, we have also pioneered to strengthen the “store-within-platform" concept in India's e-commerce industry, allowing direct contact between buyers and sellers through our application. We have changed the status of the Indian e-commerce industry that monopolized information of buyers and sellers, allowing SMEs to own their customers and run their business better. All this, combined with our strategy to reduce the transaction costs of buyers and sellers and allow more local players to enter the ecosystem, has worked very well for us in India."
