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Coutloot, an offline-to-online (O2O) social commerce platform, raised $8 million in a pre-series round led by venture capital firm Ameba Capital.
Other investors such as SOSV, 9Unicorns, Astarc Ventures also participated in the round, including existing investor Venture Catalysts.
The new funding is a precursor to a bigger $25 million round to be closed soon, the company said.
Fund deployment
Coutloot plans to use the funds for launching more services for retailers such as working capital solutions, video-stories commerce features, scaling its B2B supply chain, and stepping-up hiring activities across verticals, including tech, marketing and leadership roles.
Founded by Jasmeet Thind and Mahima Kaul, the company is aiming to build an online buying and selling platform in India, replicating the success of platforms such as Alibaba Group’s Taobao.
It is a platform that allows buyers and sellers to bargain while shopping. It helps sellers list non-MRP (non-fixed-price), unbranded local market products across fashion, electronics, home decor, sports and other boxed categories that account for 75 per cent of India’s retail sector at present.
Its app also allows buyers to chat in their preferred language, which gets translated into the seller’s preferred language.
Jasmeet Thind, Co-founder and CEO at Coutloot, said, “We are here to humanise e-commerce in India that is still just 10 per cent of the total retail and FMCG sector. Most commerce still happens offline for various reasons, including low trust and bargain.”
“Coutloot helps sellers and buyers with that power to decide the prices after a bargain on the chat. We are trying to create Coutloot as India’s Taobao, which is one of fascinating e-commerce success stories around the world,” Thind said.
The company has grown 11 times during the pandemic and has been growing at a CAGR of 300 per cent over the last three years. Coutloot is looking to clock a platform GMV of ₹1,000 crore in 2022 on the back of rising demand coming from smaller towns.
The company’s best-performing sellers come from smaller towns like Nagaon in Assam, Basai near Gurugram, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Surat in Gujarat, and Ludhiana in Punjab. The platform has a quarterly seller retention rate of 42 percent.
Top sellers on Coutloot are making upto ₹8 lakh a month while an average seller makes around ₹14,650.
It provides business opportunities to over 5,00,000 offline retailers, mom-and-pop stores, home sellers, and street hawkers, the company said. It has over 20 million listings on its app, which has been downloaded over 7.2 million times.
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