ⓘ Featured image: A file-photo of Akanksha Hazari, Founder & CEO of LoveLocal
LoveLocal, one of India’s leading hyper-local E-commerce platforms that empowers local retailers, on Thursday raised $18 million (around INR 143 crores), in its Pre-Series B investment round. The round was led by Vulcan Capital, with participation from Flat Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Commerce Ventures, along with some prominent angel investors and founders including Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder of Truecaller; Sriram Krishnan, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Anna Lambert, Director of Product Acceleration at Shopify; Sarah Jones Simmer, CEO of Found & ex-COO of Bumble; Arpan Sheth, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, and others. The round also saw participation from existing investors including Blume Ventures, AC Ventures, HenkelX Ventures, Chiratae Ventures & Candy Ventures also invested.
Founded by Akanksha Hazari as m.Paani in 2015 and rebranded as LoveLocal in January 2020, the company aims to revolutionise how India shops by empowering local retailers and digitising the $1.1 trillion unorganised retail market. LoveLocal has grown 40x since inception and currently serves 35+ cities across India, in just 18 months.
The whopping $18 million Pre-Series B round marks the largest round ever raised by a solo woman tech founder in India. This indeed represents a huge step forward in the Indian startup ecosystem and comes at a time when less than 1% of Indian VC deals are invested in women-only led companies. Moreover, the country is grappling with a sharply declining female labour force participation rate, the lowest in South Asia.
Speaking of the development for LoveLocal, Akanksha Hazari, Founder & CEO of LoveLocal, in a statement said,
“We have always believed in the local retailer. They win on every consumer consideration: service, quality, product selection, value, credit and free delivery. Local businesses account for more than 40% of jobs in India. LoveLocal is bridging the technology gap to ensure that our local retailers not just survive but thrive in India 2.0.”
Indian retail is powered by 60 million+ local businesses. They represent 95% of the $1.1 trillion retail markets. Despite the launch of e-commerce and new big box retail options, this unorganised market has doubled in the past 5 years. As over a billion Indian consumers move online, these local shops must transform to serve this new digitally-driven shopper.
In the next 3 years, LoveLocal aims to take 1 million local retailers online and power the largest hyperlocal E-commerce platform in India. Hazari added, “The future of Indian retail is, and must be, local.”
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