Dukaan, an Indian startup founded in Bangalore, has announced Monday that it raised $11 Million in a new funding round. This will allow it to expand its offerings and strengthen its footprint in the South Asian market.
New York-based 640 Oxford Ventures led the Pre-Series A financing round. Venture Catalyst and HOF Capital were also involved in the round. LetsVenture and 9Unicorns were also present investors, as well as Lightspeed Partners, Leopard Ventures and Leopard Ventures.
Ritesh Agarwal from Oyo, and Carl Peiof Nothing, also invested in this round. The startup has raised more than $17 million so far and is currently valued at $71million.
Dukaan offers individuals no-code tools for setting up a digital presence. It is simple and fast. You first need to verify your email address and phone number, then you can write your store or business name. That's it. In an interview with TechCrunch, Suumit Shah, chief executive and co-founder of Dukaan, stated that your digital store was created.
After setting up the store, the merchants can add inventory manually and begin selling to customers. Dukaan allows grocery merchants to take photos of their inventory, and then automatically log them into the digital store. These merchants can also accept digital payments through the startup.
Dukaan is heavily tapping into India's vast neighborhood market. This is a more localized market than kiranas, and employs over 100 million Indians. Many of these stores have been in operation for decades.
Many firms, including Flipkart, Amazon, and Reliance have tried to disrupt their businesses in recent years to little or no success. These firms are exploring new ways to interact with merchants.
Dukaan can be used by both restaurants looking to go online and teachers wanting to establish a digital presence. According to the startup, it has helped facilitate over 1.5 million transactions.
By default, all these digital shops get a mydukaan.io site, which they can distribute to their customers and friends. Shah said that this has made our startup more visible in the market.
Startups charge individuals and businesses as low as 6,999 Indian Rupees or $95, annually for their services. It also offers premium plans like Dukaan Infinity, which helps businesses market on Facebook and Google. This plan helps them rank higher on Google search.
Dukaan Enterprise is a customer of Big Bazaar, a German retail chain. Nivea has many distributors in the country. He said that they have now asked their distributors sell the vast majority their inventory to Dukaan stores to increase efficiency.
According to Akshay Bhushan (Partner at Lightspeed), there is huge white space to serve India's commerce needs. The Dukaan team, with its strong product orientation, deep knowledge of small business users, is well-positioned to lead the creation new categories of commerce businesses.
Shah stated that Dukaan will use the funds to create its own payment gateway and develop plugins for integration with delivery companies and their aggregators. The story so far has been about helping people to create their stores. He said that we are now working to provide more assistance for these people.
He stated that we aim to have between 2 million and 3 million monthly transactions on the platform over the next 12 months, as well as $10 million annual recurring revenue.
