Published: 4/6/2021
Good afternoon, it's Tuesday and Indian startups are off to a great start (in terms of fundraising) in Q2 with two companies announcing multi-million dollar rounds yesterday for a total of $1.1B! The first being Meesho & the second being Swiggy, both whom have seen tremendous growth towards the end of last year.
➡️ Meesho, the social commerce platform, announced it had raised $300M on Monday in a new financing round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 which values the company at $2.1B. Meesho was one of the earliest Indian companies to go through YC and the current round includes previous backers Facebook, Prosus Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Venture Highway and Knollwood Investment.
➡️ It was a little interesting to see Shunwei participate in the round given the geopolitical tensions and new rules around raising capital from Chinese firms. The company will use the capital to expand their operations as they aim to be the “single ecosystem that will enable all small businesses to succeed online.”
➡️ The company operates a marketplace where it helps sellers manage their operations (order management, logistics, payments, and more) as well as connect with customers on social platforms. The company already has a base of 13M sellers, a majority of whom are women, all over the country.
➡️ Over 50M consumers have bought a product from Meesho, and the company's monthly transacting users and monthly orders has grown significantly in the last year (10x and 6x respectively).
➡️ And now the company has the capital to fuel their growth further grow to 100M individual and small businesses selling on the platform. I'm super psyched to see the company really emphasize on growth for the next couple of years as it is one of the few Indian companies that is actually working towards the financial independence of women in the country.
2. https://bit.ly/3mn7ixC: Swiggy raises $800M in a round that values the company at $5B
➡️ With Zomato raising a bunch of capital as of late, it only made sense that Swiggy would too next. The online food delivery platform has raised $800M in a round led by Falcon Edge , Amansa Capital, Think Investments, Carmignac and Goldman Sachs.
➡️ The sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Singapore also seem to be a part of the financing round, and existing backers Prosus Ventures and Accel also participated in the oversubscribed round.
➡️ While the early pandemic certainly hit the food delivery business bad, it seems to have mostly recovered and even grown towards the end of the last year and early this year. It is yet to be seen the impact of the new phase of the pandemic has on the food delivery companies as some cities and states start enforcing curfews.
➡️ I think 2021 will be another exciting year for food delivery + hyperlocal delivery cos with the Zomato IPO, continual battle between Zomato and Swiggy and the other things that Dunzo and Amazon are upto.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/viditaatrey/status/1378939920639664128
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