ShopClues raises Series E at a valuation of $1.1 Billion

Mass-market online retailer ShopClues.com that led the adoption of the marketplace model in India received an undisclosed amount of funding in its Series E round.  With this deal, ShopClues’ valuation stands at more than $1.1Billion. The round of capital infusion is being led by GIC, the largest sovereign wealth fund of Singapore. Existing investors, including Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners have also participated in this round of funding.

GIC’s Head of Asia Equities Research, Ravi Balasubramanian, said, “As a long-term investor, GIC believes in the strong growth potential of India's e-commerce industry. We are confident that ShopClues’ merchant-first mind-set and solid management team will enable the company to expand its reach, especially in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, bringing its unique value proposition to even more consumers and merchants.”

Commenting on the capital raised Sanjay Sethi, CEO & Co-founder, ShopClues said, “ShopClues has consistently demonstrated that hyper-growth and strong business fundamentals are not mutually exclusive. The recent addition of GIC and the continued strong support from our existing investors is a validation of our capital efficiency with a clear path to profitability. This investment will enable us to double our focus on digitizing our merchants’ businesses so that they scale to fully leverage the opportunity online commerce provides them.”

ShopClues’ GMV has grown over 4X since January 2015, and the business is shipping out over 3.5 Million items on a monthly basis, attracting a traffic of more than 100 Million visits a month. The business growth is accompanied by strong improvements in capital efficiency and expects to be profitable by H1 2017. The company continues to empower the sales of over 3.5 Lakh Registered SME Merchants, and has launched multiple new services for Seller Marketing in the past one year. These include Working Capital Loans, ShopClues Connect (Chat Services), Neighborhood Market (Hyperlocal Discovery Platform), Logistics & Payment services, Domain Services, and a thriving seller forum.​

Speaking about the funding, Radhika Aggarwal, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, ShopClues commented, “Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point & unstructured categories like lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic & automotive accessories etc. Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer & merchant network. We are confident that our capital efficiency & execution will make this our last fund raise before we become profitable with the eventual IPO in 2017.”

The capital raised will be used to focus on building and rolling out new products to enable the SME merchants to digitize their business and to further entrench itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud.

ShopClues was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and renowned wall-street analyst Sandeep Aggarwal. Sandeep bootstrapped the company with his own funds and angel money that he raised from his friends and family till the first institutional raise of $4mn in Jan 2012.