PremiumBENGALURU : Social commerce startup, ApnaKlub, has raised fresh funds as part of its pre-series A round, led by Blume Ventures and Whiteboard Capital.
Founded in 2020, ApnaKlub allows individuals with smartphones to earn supplemental income by aggregating demand and supplying fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) to kirana stores in their local community. The platform provides these unorganised ground-level wholesalers with an organised supply infrastructure with the best pricing and consistent product availability.
“ApnaKlub empowers its partners in semi-urban and rural areas, by providing organised supply and digital tools so that they can build an efficient micro-business catering to the needs of shopkeepers and large families around them. Their hard work and understanding of local needs coupled with our digital tools and learning modules makes for a winning micro-business," said Shruti, chief executive officer and co-founder, ApnaKlub.
Through the social commerce model, the company has built an independent sales network for brands that want to penetrate new markets.
“ApnaKlub started back in 2020 when the pandemic opened up Pandora’s box of problems of availability and price distribution in the rural supply structure of the country. These problems, which are deep-rooted, gave an opening to ApnaKlub to onboard and equip its partners with the supplies and tools required to build great micro-businesses," said Manish Kumar, chief operating officer, ApnaKlub.
Within seven months of inception, ApanKlub has serviced over 2,500 partners across 4,500 pin codes. The brand plans to use the investment to deepen its reach in rural geographies, expand its team across technology and operations and increase its range of services and brands for onboarded partners.
"Traditional wholesale FMCG distribution in Tier 2,3 India is an extremely large market but has several inefficiencies today ranging from lack of transparency and parity in pricing due to layers of intermediaries. Further, smaller challenger brands in India who are unable to service these rural kirana stores directly find it extremely difficult to access customers in these markets.
ApnaKlub's differentiated model of using a scalable network of highly motivated entrepreneurs to aggregate demand and deliver FMCG products to these kiranas is an elegant solution to solve these challenges," said Ashish Fafadia, partner at Blume Ventures.
It also offers a unique direct to partner’s customer delivery service, wherein an ApnaKlub associate partner can get the products delivered directly to their customers at a predetermined price.
“Given the massive inefficiencies in the retail supply chain across the low density markets, ApnaKlub’s mission to improve outcomes for the smaller MSME retailers across non-metro India through the innovative, tech-enabled and agent-led model is proving to be a deep-impact and profitable business model," added Anshu Prasher, general partner at Whiteboard Capital.
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