Gurugram-based Simsim, a social commerce startup recently announced that it has raised $16 million in seven months of its existence. The funding rounds happened in quick succession over the past few months and were led by Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital, and Good Capital.
Founded in July last year by Amit Bagaria, Kunal Suri, and Saurabh Vashishta, the startup has so far garnered over one million users on its app. The Simsim app, which is currently available in four different languages – Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and English, works with over 1,200 micro-community influencers.
Most of its customers are from Tier-II and Tier-III cities, with over 70% of its user base coming from outside the top 10 cities of India.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Co-founder of Simsim Amit Bagaria said, “Despite e-commerce players bandying out major discounts, most of the sales in India are still happening in brick-and-mortar stores. There is a simple reason for that: Trust,” He further added that the vast majority of Indians are still not comfortable with reading descriptions — and that too in English.
“We have just begun our journey. Before the end of this year, we want to serve our customers in 20 different languages and target to have 10 million+ customers on the platform,” Amit added.
The platform aims to provide its users with an experience similar to offline shopping by building and enabling a network of ‘Community Opinion Leaders (COLs)’, that play the role of the shopkeeper on its platform.
“The network of COLs that we are building, is critical to the social experience that the team intends to provide users. We don’t look at them as just content creators, we see them as new generation micro-entrepreneurs, running their online store,” said Amit.
Commenting on the investment, Managing Partner at Good Capital Rohan Malhotra, said, “At Good Capital, we believe that India is a country of micro-entrepreneurs, middlemen, merchants, and traders. Offline businesses (and conventional ways of shopping) have placed human trust in the center of this transaction. In addressing the next couple of hundred million people who are coming online, Simsim has found a way to emulate that comfort and behavior and bring these users meaningfully online.”
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