Gurugram, India-based CityMall, a vernacular social e-commerce startup, on Tuesday announced that it has raised $3 million in its seed funding round led by Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners), with participation from Waterbridge ventures, and LetsVenture.
Founded last year by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, CityMall is a community commerce platform for everyday products and claims that it has served over 300 million users so far.
The company said that the fresh funds will be deployed towards building a robust network of CityMall Community Leaders, expand its supply chain to Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities in India. CityMall will also utilise the fresh proceeds to introduce new categories such as fresh, grocery and FMCG.
Commenting on the development for CityMall, Angad Kikla, in a press statement said,
“The next 300 mn Internet users, living in smaller cities, towns and villages have a fundamentally different behaviour than the first 100 mn users. They are native to social platforms like WhatsApp and prefer buying from someone they trust. For that reason, community-led e-commerce is unique as it solves two distinct problems – one creating a layer of trusted community leaders and secondly, disrupting two most significant cost elements of any e-commerce business – customer acquisition and logistics.”
Speaking of the expansion plans, Naisheel Verdhan, stated,
“Apart from being vernacular, our app gamifies the journey of community leaders to help them grow their business on CityMall while offering a super-simple and convenient experience for end consumers,”
Akarsh Shrivastava, Vice President of Elevation Capital, added,
“India’s e-commerce penetration is still lower as compared to other economies like US and China, a major reason for this is limited headway existing platforms have been able to make beyond urban and tier 1 towns. The new generation of 200-300 million internet users come from beyond these towns… Citymall’s unique community leader led business model positions it uniquely to solve this problem for grocery and daily needs,”
CityMall claims that the company has attained a 12x revenue growth in the past 6 months and scaled its footprint across small towns and cities in Indian including Rewari, Dharuhera, Pataudi, Sonipat and Bahadurgarh.
The company last year raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Jitendra Gupta of Citrus Pay, Alvin Tse of Xiaomi, Manish Vij and Harish Bahl from Smile Group, Rishab Malik ex-co-founder of Droom, Rajesh Sawhney of GSF and M&S Partners among other marquee investors who do not wish to be named.
