BigFoot Retail Solutions gets Rs 13.5 crore more in Series-B funding

MUMBAI: Delhi-based BigFoot Retail Solutions, which owns and operates ecommerce-enabling solutions provider KartRocket, has closed its Series B round of funding at $8 million (about Rs 54 crore), having raised an additional $2 million (about Rs 13.5 crore) from an unnamed investor.

The latest tranche come less than two months after the four year-old company raised $6 million (Rs 40.3 crore) in a fresh round of funding that was led by Bertelsmann India Investments, the strategic investment arm of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann SE & Co, in January earlier this year.

BigFoot Retail’s existing backers, a list that includes Nirvana Digital India Fund, Nirvana Digital Investment Holding Co, US-based 500 Startups and Singapore-based Beenext, have also participated in the fund raising initiative.

Proceeds from the latest round will be primarily used by the four year-old startup to grow and market its mobile marketplace Kraftly, the offline-to-online business it launched last year, and which competes with Shopo, the mobile marketplace launched by Snapdeal, also in 2015.

“Keeping in mind Kraftly’s single vision of allowing every seller to participate in e-commerce, the investment will help us with cutting-edge product development, talent acquisition, seller eco-system development and performance marketing,” said Saahil Goel, chief executive of KartRocket.

While the exact terms of the investment were not disclosed, the new investor in the company, which was founded in 2012 by Goel, Gautam Kapoor and Vishesh Khurana, is believed to be of Japanese origin.

According to its founders, Kraftly, which was launched last year, boasts of about 15,000 shops on its platform, and claims to add over 17,000 listing on a daily basis.

Mobile-first O2O platforms are emerging as a significant business unit for the country’s ecommerce majors, as they look to onboard a greater number of merchants, particularly, small sellers, individuals and home-based entrepreneurs, a significant proportion of who still do not have an online presence, with the aim of bringing them onto a mobile marketplace, to sell products, such as fashion, accessories, crafts and other unique products.

The Kraftly platform allows micro and small entrepreneurs, a signifiant number of whom operate out of their houses, to build branded digital shops that showcase their products, along with pricing, and which are marketed heavily through social media channels. The platform also manages the payment and logistics process for each seller on the platform.

Separately, it was also reported that Snapdeal, the country’s largest ecommerce marketplace, was planning to invest $100 million (Rs 672.3 crore) in Shopo, over the next two years, and get its seller base up to a million. Snapdeal claims to have about 20,000 shops on its Shopo platform.