PremiumListen to this article |
Mumbai: Cmunity Innovations Pvt Ltd, which runs online retail platform Citymall, on Wednesday said it has raised Series C funding of $75 million led by Norwest Venture Partners.
After this new round, the company’s valuation jumped to over $300 million, a person aware of the matter told VCCircle.
The fundraise also saw participation from General Catalyst, Citius, Jungle Ventures, Arena Ventures, Elevation, Accel and Waterbridge.
With the latest funding round, the startup has so far raised $110 million. Jungle Ventures has significantly doubled down on its investment from Citymall’s Series B round, the company said.
Citymall plans to use the fresh proceeds to strengthen its leadership and engineering teams, roll out new categories on its platform, expand existing supply chain and tech stack, as well as to expand its reach to 100 towns over the next 18 months.
The company also eyes expansion of its newly added fashion and general merchandise operations.
Citymall said it is targeting 500 million new-to-internet users in tier 2, 3 and 4 cities where traditional e-commerce has less penetration as direct-to-customer supply chains are not viable for low ticket size users in these towns.
“Purchasing habits in small towns of India involve heavy offline assistance and social proof. Ticket sizes of these purchases are also a third of what we have in metro cities," said Angad Kikla, Co-Founder of Citymall.
“Citymall’s Community Leaders not only assist 1st time e-commerce users in their purchases, but also act as demand aggregation points thereby making an extremely efficient supply chain that can support low ticket sizes.
With more than 30,000 community leaders on platform, we have seen tremendous growth and best in class unit economics in the last 12-15 months," Kikla added.
Founded in 2019 by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, Citymall provides access to online commerce to tier-2 and lower cities through its network of community leaders, who serve as both marketing partners and logistics partners for the company.
The company claims to have grown over 30% month-on-month over the last 18 months, and said it has created entrepreneurship opportunities for over 30,000 community leaders across 25 towns and cities.
It further said that approximately 80% of its users have never transacted on any e-commerce platform before. On an average 10 consumers place an order with a community leader.
“CityMall is innovating at the intersection of 2 megatrends we’ve seen firsthand globally: an upgrade in consumption towards more assortment and better quality in many emerging markets, and the leapfrogging of commerce from brick-and-mortar to online enabled by increasing connectivity," said Alex Tran, managing director at General Catalyst.
“The next frontier for this is serving customers in Tier 2 to Tier 5 towns, where CityMall has proven strong product-market-fit and growth," Tan added.
