A little over three years after launching operations from Jaipur, DealShare, a social e-commerce company which competes with the likes of Flipkart Shopsy, Meesho and Udaan’s Price Company in the grocery, daily essentials and related segments, says it will cross a billion dollars in revenue run rate this financial year. The company expects to not only triple its revenues in the next two-and-half years, but also become operationally profitable.

A Unicorn valued at more than a billion dollars, DealShare says its strategy differs from that of other large players in the segments in which it operates. Co-founder, Sourjyendu Medda, said the company’s focus has been to serve socio-economic classification B (SEC B) and below customers, unlike the larger players who mainly target the SEC A category of customers. The company has raised $393 million from venture investors till date.

“We believe that social commerce is the best way to on-board retail customers who visit kiranas and other neighbourhood stores, and bring them into organised retail.”

DealShare currently operates in 100 cities and towns across 10 states. “Today, we cover 12-13 per cent of India’s population and intend to hit 25 per cent coverage by the end of next year and eventually cover the entire country in three to four years,” Medda added.

Stating that the company was capital efficient, Medda says it has spent only $75 million to achieve revenue of a billion dollars. He cites three key differentiators on the demand, sourcing and infrastructure side, which set his company apart.

On the demand side, DealShare says: “Only 20 per cent of our acquisition comes from paid modes and actually our major source of acquisition and traffic is social and organic in nature. We don’t spend much on marketing and just give minor social incentives to people who trust our platform and who, in turn, bring more and more friends and family members onto it.”

Also unlike other players who carry a wider assortment, DealShare focusses on only 2,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) which are ‘very fast-moving and high on relevance and hence the number of days of inventory that we have to carry is only 10 days. We will give a similar quality product at almost half the price and the functionality would be the same. So we are propagating a high quality low price model,” he adds.

DealShare focusses on providing good-to-go services but ‘is not the best of the best because somebody has to eventually pay for that service to make it profitable and we don’t believe that mass India would be paying for services,” Medda adds. Also, to keep costs low, unlike competitors, it does the whole of fulfilment, including warehousing plus delivery. “We believe that we have barely scratched the surface in what could eventually be a $500 billion-$600 billion market. With a frugal and efficient model, we believe DealShare has an edge,” says the entrepreneur.

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