Orios Venture Partners leads Rs 15cr funding round for Wholesalebox
Wholesalebox, a virtual marketplace for wholesale buying and selling, today raised Rs 15 crore in two rounds, led by Orios Venture Partners, Contrarian Drishti Partners and Rajasthan Venture Capital Fund (RVCF).
The team will use the funding to expand its footprint in India, streamline the supply-chain in the segment and on-board manufacturing and offline store partners onto its platform.
Founded in 2015 by Rohit Dangayach, Chandan Agarwal, Rakesh Shekhawat and Madhur Bhaiya, Wholesalebox is an e-commerce portal, connecting manufacturers and brands with retailers in the fashion and lifestyle category. It currently houses over 20,000+ offline retail stores and brings convenience, logistics, data, analytics and affordability to these stores while providing a convenient platform to generate wholesale off-take for manufacturers.
This Jaipur-based platform enables shopkeepers to buy directly at factory prices and currently sources primarily from Rajasthan and Gujarat.
It is working to digitise and curate the supply chain in lifestyle and fashion space through its B2B platform, bringing more than 20-25 percent efficiency. Through this, it aims to solve the procurement pain-point for unorganised retail stores, which still comprises more than 80 percent of the market.
Commenting on the fundraise, Wholesalebox CEO and co-founder Rohit said, "We aim to utilise this fund to build Wholesalebox the largest platform in India with tech-led curation at both ends and will provide all necessary technology, such as B2B2C tech tools, PoS software to all shopkeepers and factories to become their most preferred supplier/buyer."
The startup is also working on an O2O plan, as part of its Google partnership, wherein it will make the offline inventory of these stores discoverable online. It uses data science and machine learning to feed the retailer with what can sell fast at his outlet by doing strong personalization on taste and preferences for each shopkeeper.
On the investments, Rohan Dedhia, Assistant Vice President of Orios Venture Partners, said, “Lifestyle & fashion is an extremely large industry offline ($100 billion+) that has operated traditionally for years. We believe that technology can help the retailer in all aspects of business - procurement, personalisation, customer acquisition, loyalty, distress inventory etc. We have identified the team Wholesalebox a worthy ‘misfits’ who are the force behind building this technology platform for the next for these retailers targeting the next 300 million, which otherwise would have no access to this technology.”
Wholesalebox has plans to expand its partnerships from 1,000 manufacturers to 15 major manufacturing hubs.