Fresh funding makes Shopclues latest entrant to $1bn club

Online marketplace Shopclues on Tuesday said its valuation rose to $1.1 billion, making it a ‘Unicorn' (companies valued at $1 billion or more). The valuation is on the basis of fresh funds – believed to be $150 million – that the company raised from Singapore government's GIC and its existing investors Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners.

According to Shopclues, this would be the last fund-raising before its public issue next year.

The Gurgaon-based firm had raised $100 million in January 2015 from Tiger Global at a valuation of $500 million.

The capital raised in the fresh funds would be used to roll out new products to enable small and medium enterprises to digitise their business and to further entrench itself as the e-commerce operating system on the cloud, Shopclues stated.

ShopClues will also strengthen its branding activities and acquire smaller companies.

The four-year-old company's gross merchandise value has grown four-fold since January 2015, when it raised $100 million from Tiger Global. ShopClues, which currently ships 3.5 million items a month, says it gets 100 million visits a month.

The e-commerce platform expects to turn profitable by the first half of 2017. The company has about 350,000 merchants on its platform.

With ShopClues joining the unicorn club, the e-commerce battle is set to get fiercer in India as the sector is anticipating a year of major consolidations. The other Indian startups in the multi-billion dollar club include e-retailers Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm, online classifieds firm Quikr, cab aggregator Ola, food technology start-up Zomato, mobile ad network platform InMobi and analytics firm MuSigma.

The company was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs Sandeep Aggarwal, his wife Radhika Aggarwal, and Sanjay Sethi. 

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