[Funding alert] GlobalBees raises $150M in Series A to build a Thrasio-like house of brands

New Delhi-based investment venture GlobalBees on Monday said it raised $150 million in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A funding led by FirstCry and some of its investors, with additional participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

This claims to be the largest Series A funding round by an Indian Thrasio style startup. With this round, Vikas Agnihotri of SoftBank, Harsha Kumar of Lightspeed, Atul Gupta of Premji Invest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures, and Kshitij Sheth of Chrys Capital will join the GlobalBees board.

With a focus on capital efficiency, GlobalBees looks to partner with digitally native brands across categories like beauty, personal care, home, kitchen, food, nutrition, sports, lifestyle, etc., with a revenue rate of $1 million - $20 million, which as per the company, is proof of a product-market fit. 

According to the company, India is seeing an uptick of smaller brands, with nearly 120,000 new vendors selling on Amazon India, of which around 4,200 brands crossed Rs 1 crore in sales in 2020. These numbers present an opportunity for GlobalBees to accelerate the D2C sector.

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Speaking on the development, Nitin Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, GlobalBees, said, 

"GlobalBees aims to unleash the power of product innovation by Indian entrepreneurs and strategically partner with them to help them realise the full potential of their brand and products. Apart from capital, GlobalBees brings in strategic capabilities across marketing and growth, technology, distribution, sourcing, branding, warehousing, logistics, R&D, product development, and operations — all things essential to rapidly scale the brands in the digital space.”

“We are looking to partner with founders who have built brands based on unique consumer insights. The funds raised will play a crucial role in helping us scale these brands globally,” added Nitin.

With a backdrop of rapid growth over the past few years, Indian D2C brands have come to the forefront in 2021. GlobalBees is already in the process of integrating over 10 digitally native brands in the country.

"India is at the cusp of a D2C revolution with estimated market size of $200 billion in the next five years. Indian brands have shown great promise in recent years, and we believe that GlobalBees is building great assets to accelerate the growth of digitally native brands in the country,” said Vikas Agnihotri, Operating Partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers.

According to Sudhir Sethi, Founder and Chairman, Chiratae Ventures India, GlobalBees present a technology platform to consolidate D2C brands and massively scale them in India and the world.