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Rival e-commerce companies Flipkart and Snapdeal are already in the billion dollar club

Radhika Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer and Co-founder of ShopClues

Amid market concerns and criticism that Indian e-commerce companies are overvalued, ShopClues has raised an undisclosed amount in Series E round of funding led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, which “believes in the strong growth potential of India’s e-commerce industry”.

With this, the Gurgaon-based managed e-commerce marketplace has joined the billion dollar club, with a US$1.1 billion valuation.

Existing investors, including Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners, also participated in the Series E round.

Also Read: Flipkart names Binny Bansal new CEO amid US$1.4B fundraising talks

The capital will be used to build and roll out new products to enable SMB merchants to digitise their business, in addition to strengthening its tech backbone and logistics infrastructure and on-boarding more merchants.

The funding comes exactly a year after it received over US$100 million in Series D funding led by Tiger Global.

The development comes at a time when Bangalore-based Flipkart is reportedly in talks to raise US$1.4 billion funding to be led by US-based investment firm Sands Capital Management.

ShopClues was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sandeep Aggarwal. Unlike other marketplaces, which tend to focus on mobile, electronics, computers and branded fashion, ShopClues mainly focusses on unstructured categories.

The e-commerce company claims that its GMV has grown over 4x since January 2015, and is shipping out over 3.5 million items on a monthly basis, attracting a traffic of more than 100 million visits a month.

It has 350,000 registered SMB merchants selling on its platform. The firm launched multiple new services for seller marketing last year, including working capital loans, ShopClues Connect (chat services), Neighbourhood Market (hyperlocal discovery platform), logistics & payment services, and domain services.

Radhika Aggarwal, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, ShopClues, said: “Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point and unstructured categories like lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic and automotive accessories etc. Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer and merchant network.”

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