[Funding alert] Social ecommerce startup ShopG closes $1.5M seed round

Social ecommerce platform ShopGon Wednesday closed a $1.5 million seed funding round led by Orios Venture Partners and RPSG Ventures, the startup said.

Angel investors, including Rajesh Yabaji, CEO of BlackBuck; Raghunandan G, former CEO of Taxi for Sure; and Prasanth Nair, ex-Flipkart, also participated in the round.

ShopG — which caters mostly to Tier III and IV cities — was founded by Ankur Arora, Abhishek Mishra, Pranay Suwalka, and Yogesh Nehra, who have previously worked with Rivigo, Ola, ClearTax, and Delhivery.

The new funds will help ShopG expand its community leader network in lower-tier cities, scale its technology, build a supply of small regional brands, as well as help create a suite of D2C-branded products.

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At present, it has over a thousand community leaders that work with regional brands to source goods, as well as help build a vernacular, fun, and engaging social shopping platform.

"The next 500 million internet customers, from Tier3/4 cities of India, who earn an average household income of Rs 25,000-30,000 per month, prefer assisted buying from someone they trust and have low average order values of less than Rs 250 — making it impossible for existing ecommerce players like Amazon, Flipkart, etc., to service them with high customer acquisition and supply chain costs," said Co-founders Ankur and Abhishek, adding this is the pain-point ShopG is trying to solve.

The startup partners with regional brands that offer good quality products, but have little to no distribution or reach, and gives them a platform to showcase their products.

With social commerce set to become a $25 billion market by 2025, from $2 billion presently, ShopG expects to continue seeing exponential growth.

"We are excited to partner with the ShopG team, which has developed a profitable model, bringing the power of micro-entrepreneurs, digital-ready customers, and tailored set of small brands, including their own on a common tech platform,” said Anup Jain, Managing Partner at Orios Venture Partners.