Online retail platform Dukaan raises $11 mn in pre-series A round

Dukaan, the online retail platform that allows anyone to set up an online store and sell their products, on Monday announced it has secured $11 million in a pre-series A round of funding, valuing the firm at $71 million.

The round was led by 640 Oxford Ventures, with participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India. Venture Catalyst and new venture firms HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns and a number of high-profile executives also participated in the funding round, which included Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Carl Pei, Co-founder and the CEO of Nothing.

“This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base. We started with our monetization journey on a small merchant base last quarter, and more than 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far. Premium subscription is just one of the revenue streams, which contributes about 10 per cent to our revenues,” said Suumit Shah, CEO and co-founder, Dukaan.

Since its launch in June 2020, Dukaan has facilitated over 1.5 million transactions and a new store is being created every 2 minutes.

“We founded Dukaan because we saw small businesses and first-time entrepreneurs struggling to digitize and make their presence online. We became obsessed with the idea of making the most affordable, easy-to-use, mobile-first commerce platform in the world,” said Shah.

Rajinder Balaraman, director, Matrix India said, “Small businesses are digitising faster than ever in India’s history and Dukaan’s simple yet effective SaaS product has struck a chord with these customers and enables them to grow their business online. We wish Suumit, Subhash and the Dukaan team great success in their journey ahead.”

Founded in June 2020 by Suumit Shah and Subhash Choudhary, Dukaan is a no-code platform that makes it easier for anyone to launch an ecommerce website in a few minutes and scale it on the internet. Each e-commerce website powered by Dukaan is customisable in terms of design and functionality. In addition to that, Dukaan merchants can link their UPI ID with Dukaan and start accepting payments via credit card, debit card, UPI and wallet from the end customers.

“Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMB’s need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products . We are thrilled to partner with Suumit and the Dukaan team on their path to becoming a generational company,” said  640 Oxford Ventures.

Dukaan is a do-it-yourself platform that enables merchants with zero programming skills to set up their e-commerce store using smartphones. It has over 3.5 million small and medium-sized businesses on the platform from all over India, and is helping these businesses to start, grow, market, and manage their business over the internet in over 40 business categories. It raised $6 million in a seed round from Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Partners in Oct 2020.

“There is a massive white space opportunity to service the commerce needs of India’s over 100 million small businesses and the Dukaan team with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user is ideally positioned to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses in India,” said Akshay Bhushan, partner, Lightspeed.