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CityMall has raised a $75 million Series C funding led by Norwest Venture Partners. General Catalyst, Citius, Jungle Ventures, Arena Ventures, Elevation, Accel & Waterbridge also participated in the round. This is the start-up’s third fundraising in the last 18 months, bringing the total capital raised to $110 million.
Founded in 2019 by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, CityMall works on the community group buying (popularly known as community commerce) model to bring e-commerce to consumers in tier 2/3/4 towns. Some of the other companies operating in the space include Udaan’s Price Company, Flipkart Shopsy, Dealshare, Gobillion, and Meesho.
Usage of funds
The fresh funds will be used to strengthen the start-up’s leadership and engineering teams, introduce new categories on its platform, expand its existing supply chain and tech stack, and grow its reach to 100 towns over the next 18 months. In addition, the company will expand its presence in fashion and general merchandise, which was added to the platform recently.
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Commenting on the fundraise, Angad Kikla, co-founder of CityMall, said, “Purchasing habits in small towns of India involve heavy offline assistance and social proof. Ticket sizes of these purchases are also one-third of what we have in metro cities. CityMall’s community leaders not only assist first time e-commerce users in their purchases but also act as demand aggregation points thereby making an extremely efficient supply chain that can support low ticket sizes.
Kikla added, ”With more than 30,000 community leaders on platform, we have seen tremendous growth in the last 12-15 months. We have a stellar leadership team and some of the biggest global investors backing us, and with the latest fundraising, we’re well-positioned to further our lead as the leaders of community commerce in India.”
Target customers
CityMall targets the 500 million new-to-Internet users in these towns.
Community leaders work on a commission-based model where they use their social network to invite friends and family members to form a shopping team to qualify for discounts, assist them to make purchases across a variety of categories including grocery, FMCG and fashion, and also manage the last-mile delivery of orders. The company is said to have created entrepreneurship opportunities for over 30,000 community leaders across 25 towns and cities.
Niren Shah, MD and Head of India, Norwest Venture Partners, said, “We have been impressed by the strong product-market fit and hypergrowth that CityMall has demonstrated over the last few months. CityMall is a pioneer in the community group buying model in India, and has been able to serve lower value orders through a network of community leaders solving for efficient customer acquisition and lower supply chain costs.
Shah added, “We are excited to partner with Angad, Naisheel and the entire CityMall team as they create an online supermart for the next 200 million customers from tier-2 to tier-5 towns, closely aligning with the government’s development goals of increasing online penetration in tier-2 towns and beyond.”
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