Stellaris VP leads $5 Mn Series A round in social e-commerce platform Shop101

Social e-commerce platform Shop101 has raised $5 million in its Series A funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners. The Mumbai-based online marketplace platform also saw participation from existing investors Vy Capital, TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G, and Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma.

The startup will use the fresh funds to strengthen its core leadership and product team, scale the supplier network and enhance the technology platform.

Shop101 was floated by Abhinav Jain and Aditya Gupta in 2015. It essentially enables merchants to sell their products online and via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.

For merchants, Shop101 provides everything - right from website to SMS updates, e-mail updates, payment gateway, shipping partners, among other services.

So far, the startup claims to have empowered 300,000 entrepreneurs and currently has 100,000 application downloads on Playstore.

With more than Rs 100 crore orders placed, Shop101 also claims to have grown 25-30 per cent month on month over the last couple of years.

The lead investor Stellaris, launched early last year, has been an active investor in core enterprise spaces such as cloud, IoT, machine learning, enterprise applications, and analytics. The Series A oriented venture capital firm had secured an undisclosed amount from Cisco Investment.

A few months ago, Stellaris had led $5 million Series A round in logistics startup Loadshare. Prior to that, it funded on-demand doctor consultation platform mFine, SaaS-based staff communication platform Noticeboard, enterprise-focused SaaS support platform Whatafix and mobile-centric B2B marketplace WYDR, among others.

The development was reported by Mint.