[Funding alert] Vernacular social commerce platform Mall91 raises Series A of $7.5M led by Go-Ventures

Noida-based Mall91, a social commerce platform, has secured $7.5 million through its Series A funding round led by Go-Ventures, the investment arm of ride-hailing firm GoJek, with participation from existing investors Beenext, Kalaari Capital, and AngelList India.

Started in 2018 by Nitin Raj Gupta and Shubham Paramhans, Mall91 is a vernacular social commerce platform which combines live videos-based shopping, local language voice recognition-based catalogue, Whatsapp-like chat-based checkouts. The company claims that it has already reached to 2,000 Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns and villages of India by enabling their life's first ecommerce transaction.

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With this capital infusion, Mall91 aims to solidify its presence as the one-stop-shop for the next 400 million vernacular internet users across Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities in India and abroad, it said in a statement.

Speaking on the investment, Co-founder and CEO of Mall91, Nitin Raj Gupta said,

“We are excited about this partnership and with backing from such strong supporters, Mall91 will be able to scale to greater heights and deliver an exceptional experience to our patrons. While we focus on enhancing our platform and offerings, we will also aim to expand our talent pool to drive our ambitious growth plans.”

Mall91 will also use the funds to add new eight local languages of India to its platform. It also seeks to amplify its supply chain capabilities domestically and internationally while also expanding its engineering, operations, marketing, and support teams, the company said.

Go-Ventures’ VP Investments, Aditya Kumar said, 

"We believe that Mall91's vision and approach can be successful in emerging markets across the world, and look forward to supporting the company's growth going forward."

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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