India's Snapdeal raises $100m in new funding
Temasek Holdings, BlackRock, Premji Invest and Hong Kong-based investors Myriad Asset Management and Tybourne Capital Management have together invested $100 million in Jasper Infotech, the Indian e-commerce company behind Snapdeal.
The financing comes three months after Snapdeal raised $133.8 million from existing investors including eBay, Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Saama Capital.
Snapdeal launched in 2010 and received an initial funding round of $12 million from Kalaari and Nexus in January 2011, when it was still a deals and coupon website. The two VC firms, supported by Bessemer, returned six months later with another $40 million.
The same group came back in 2013 and invested a further $50 million in a Series C round alongside eBay, Intel, Russia's ru-Net, Saama, and Japan's Recruit Holdings.
Softbank invested another $75 million four months later. In the interim, Snapdeal had pivoted to become a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce company. According to AVCJ Research, this latest round brings the total amount raised by Snapdeal to $410 million.
"We see this financing round as another endorsement of Snapdeal's differentiated strategy and progress as India's largest online marketplace," said Kunal Bahl, Snapdeal's co-founder and CEO in a statement. "Our mobile and internet commerce marketplace is now connecting millions of buyers to a very large base of sellers that offer products and services of national and international brands."
The business has already started making strategic acquisitions. It purchased Shopo.in - an online market place for hand-crafted accessories previously backed by Sequoia, SRI Capital and Seeders Venture Capital - in May, and last month it bought social discovery e-commerce site Doozton.com.
Snapdeal is the main competitor to Flipkart - another large Indian e-commerce player which has so far raised around $540 million from VC investors. This includes a $360 million Series E investment that closed with its second tranche last October, making it the largest ever funding round for an Indian internet company.
Flipkart has also been looking at strategic acquisitions and was recently reported by Live Mint to be in advanced talks to acquire fashion e-commerce site Myntra in deal valuing the company at around $330 million. Myntra took a $50 million investment from Snapdeal-backer Premji Invest in February.
According to a September 2013 report by Technopak Advisors, the Indian e-commerce market is worth $1 billion, or 0.2% of the overall retail market. It is projected to reach $56 billion (in real terms), and 6.5% of the retail market, by 2023.
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