CraftsVilla, an online marketplace for ethnic products, today announced that it has raised $34 million in Series C round of funding, led by Sequoia India and LightSpeed Venture Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital and Apoletto.
The newly infused capital will help company to further build its engineering and product capabilities, enhance customer care, and scaling in the ethnic category to reach $500 Million GMV in the next 12 months.
While the company has already started its operations in Malaysia, it is planning to soon start operating in Indonesia. This new funding will allow the company to do so.
With this Series C round of funding, the valuation of the company now stands at $200 million. It is now planning to go public in the next 12 to 18 months, as per Manoj Gupta.
Earlier this year, the company had raised $18 million in Series B round of funding from Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and GFC.
We are looking at a valuation of at least a billion dollars in the next 12-18 months, before we go public. Our aim is to hit $500 Mn in GMV over the next one year.
said Manoj Gupta, co-founder and CEO of CraftsVilla
If CraftsVilla goes public, it will be the third e-commerce company of India to get listed and the first in the niche e-commerce game. Infibeam is the first one to get approval from SEBI to raise Rs. 450 crore via IPO. Today, along with its new funding round, Shopclues also revealed its plan to go public, following Infibeam.
CraftsVilla was founded in 2011 by Monica & Manoj Gupta. It is an online marketplace for unique handmade, handcrafted, organic and gift items. Claiming to have more than 25,000 sellers on its platform, the company is selling close to 3.5 million products.
The company is currently witnessing 6x Year-on-Year growth. In terms of GMV, it is the sixth largest e-commerce company in India, claims CraftsVilla. Currently, it gets 20% margin on the products, but over the next few months, the company is looking to launch its own private label in order to get more margins.
Shailendra Singh, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said,
Craftsvilla empowers small household manufacturers of ethnic apparel and products to sell their products to customers across the world. Craftsvilla has risen to category leadership in the ethnic space with a lean marketplace model that has scaled in an unusually capital efficient manner. We are excited to continue to back them to grow Craftsvilla to the next level.
The online ethnic wear market is speculated to be worth around $300-500 million in size with the bigger horizontal e-commerce players like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon aggressively pushing their presence in the segment.
The Ethnic products market in India itself is hugely scattered. While India is known for its traditional textiles, art, carvings, jewellery and other domains, there hasn’t been a one stop shop for interested buyers to buy such products.
