Dukaan, a SaaS platform that enables merchants with zero programming skills to set up their e-commerce store, has said that it has secured $11 million in the 640 Oxford Ventures led pre Series A round. The fresh funding round saw participation from existing investors including Snow Leopard Ventures, Matrix Partners India and Lightspeed Partners.
Venture Catalyst along with HOF Capital, LetsVenture, Old Well Ventures, 9Unicorns as well as Ritesh Agarwal and Carl Pei – Co-founder and CEO of Nothing also saw participated in the funding round.
Speaking on the investment, Suumit Shah, CEO and Co-founder of Dukaan, commented, “We founded Dukaan because we saw small businesses and first-time entrepreneurs struggling to digitise and make their presence online. We became obsessed with the idea of making the most affordable, easy-to-use, mobile-first commerce platform in the world.”
He further said, “This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base. We started with our monetisation journey on a small merchant base last quarter, and more than 2,000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far. Premium subscription is just one of the revenue streams, which contributes ~10 percent to our revenues.”
640 Oxford Ventures stated, “Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMB’s need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products. We are thrilled to partner with Suumit and the Dukaan team on their path to becoming a generational company.”
Akshay Bhushan, Partner at Lightspeed, said, “There is a massive white space opportunity to service the commerce needs of India’s 100M+ small businesses and the Dukaan team with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user is ideally positioned to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses in India.”
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.