India gifting platform secures $23m Series B

Additional commitments came from Convivialité Venture – the venture capital arm of France-headquartered beverage giant Pernod Ricard – and existing investors such as DSG Consumer Partners, Venture Catalysts, and ZNL Growth. Join secured USD 10m in Series A funding earlier this year from DSG, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, and Rajiv Dadlani Group.

The start-up, which was established in 2020 by CEO Tarun Joshi, formerly of 3i Group, describes itself as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand platform. These have gained traction across Asia, but especially in India, in recent years as agglomeration tools that leverage centralised e-commerce expertise, technology infrastructure, and logistics achieve scale.

Joshi started out with IGP, a multi-category gifting business that provides flowers, cakes, plants, gourmet foods, and personalised products, and Interflora India, which claims to be the country’s largest D2C brand for premium flowers. Since then, IGP has expanded into reward management and corporate gifting through IGP For Business, and D2C food brand Masqa has been added.

Join Ventures claims its business has grown threefold in the past two years, and now serves a customer base of around 3m through three main warehouses and more than 40 dark stores. Joshi has previously said he wants to build India’s largest temperature-controlled, same-day delivery network. In addition, the company claims same-day delivery capabilities spanning 100 countries.

The new capital will be used to expand the network of dark stores and enhance the company’s technology stack, as well as to launch new products and categories over the next 18 months.

“A vast market size is driven by evolving Indian consumers who are looking beyond generic products and moving towards personalised, unique and theme-based products, and we believe that our curated and personalised design-to-delivery consumer experience fulfils their evolving needs,” Joshi said in a statement.

Vijay Dhanuka, head of consumer at Motilal Oswal, added that digital channels will be a strong enabler for consumer businesses to scale at a rapid pace as India increasingly moves online.

Interflora’s rivals include Ferns N Petals, which received funding from Lighthouse Funds this year. In the broader corporate gifting space, Apis Partners has been building out an Asia-based, globally-focused ecosystem comprising Giift, an outsourced loyalty management program provider, and Xoxoday, which enables performance by employees to be rewarded much like loyalty in customers.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Early-stage
• Consumer
• Technology
• India
• Motilal Oswal Private Equity
• DSG Partners Asia
• TMT