Reliance to adopt tech solutions from retail tech firm Fynd

“Reliance is focused on offline-to-online commerce and whatever we are doing in terms of the technology platform is a step in that direction," said Harsh Shah, co-founder of Fynd. “We are also figuring out more synergies but nothing has been rolled out or deployed yet."

Co-founded by Farooq Adam, Sreeraman M.G. and Shah, Fynd provides an omni-channel retail product to brick-and-mortar stores, allowing stores to list their entire inventory on Fynd’s online e-commerce marketplace.

Over the last 4-5 years, Fynd has taken its core platform of integration with brands and a layer of logistics facility to add use cases on top of it.

And now, capitalizing on their synergies with brands, the firm recently launched a new retail solution - Uniket—which could eventually form almost half of the company’s revenue.

Uniket is a retail solution for unorganized retailers who can now buy branded products from Fynd—either in bulk to be housed in the store or for a customer who wants to purchase a branded product.

For now, Fynd offers products across 51 brands to 6,500 retailers in 350 cities. Over the next 6-9 months, they plan to extend it to 200 brands for 60,000 stores across 800 cities.

“During Uniket’s pilot, around 12-15% of our revenues started coming from it and over the next nine months, we expect it to become 35-40% of our revenue," added Shah.

While currently Reliance is not playing a role in this product, if it goes as per plans, Fynd expects to utilize the Reliance ecosystem to expand further.

In August, Reliance Industries had announced that it will acquire 87.6% stake in Shopsense Retail Technologies that runs Fynd for ₹295 crore. As part of this deal, the company also has the option to further invest up to ₹100 crore by December 2021 in Fynd.

This transaction provided an exit to a long list of Fynd’s initial investors. Since its launch in September 2012, Fynd has had several investors including the likes of search giant Google which led its series C funding round in March 2018.

Other investors of Fynd included Kae Capital, IIFL, Singularity Ventures, GrowX, Tracxn Labs, Venture Catalyst, Patni family office and Hong Kong-based Axis Capital.