Social commerce startup GlowRoad has raised $7 million in a fresh funding round from its existing investors making it the maiden financing for the Bengaluru-based firm in 2020.
Accel Partners has poured in $3 million while Singapore-based Vertex Ventures has infused $2 million, regulatory filings in Singapore show. IND Fund has participated with $2 million. Importantly, the transaction was executed in May.
Filings show that this is the second tranche of funding for the three-year-old venture. It had raised its Series A round in September 2017.
Fintrackr estimates that GlowRoad has been valued at around $75 million in the new round.
Importantly, the company announced that it had topped the Series B round with $11.5 million in May last year. At that time, GlowRoad also said that it raised $24 million in total capital.
Entrackr has sent queries to the company’s co-founder Shekhar Sahu on its latest fundraise. We will update the story as when he responds.
Post allotment of the fresh round, Accel has emerged as the latest stakeholder in the company with a 22.5% share followed by co-founders Sonal Verma and Kunal Sinha who control 18.56% and 17.2% respectively. IND Fund commands 13.4% stake and Vertex holds 10.68%.
Korea Investments owns 4.75% whereas RB Investments owns 4.75%. Nilesh Pabariya and Chandra Sahu command 2.48 and 2.05% respectively. Other investors own 2.99% of the company.
GlowRoad is a women-centric C2C (customer-to-customer) reseller network like Meesho and Shop101. Earlier known as LocalQueen.com, the platform was acqui-hired in July 2017 by Sonal Verma and rechristened as GlowRoad.
It’s worth noting that Meesho had dragged GlowRoad in court and sent notices to its employees for unlawful and unethical business practices, methodically poaching employees and accessing the data that was generated by the Facebook-backed venture. Giving relief to Meesho, Bengaluru civil court restrained GlowRoad from utilising the confidential data gained through the former employees of Meesho.
The last two-three years saw the exponential growth of Chinese social commerce startups. The euphoria peaked in 2019 when the market size of the Chinese social commerce crossed $250 billion on the back of social and video commerce platforms such as Taobao, Tmall and Ali Express.
India mirrored the excitement with companies such as Meesho and Shop101 raising large sums of money in 2019. In an attempt to replicate the Chinese social commerce success, several Indian companies also sprung up with investors willing to pour money into proven business models. These include the likes of Mall91, EkAnek, BulBul, SimSim and City Mall.
City Mall and BulBul are the two other companies in this space that raised funds in 2020. Significantly, large companies including Paytm and ShareChat also forayed into the social commerce bandwagon this year.
