Amazon-backed gift card solutions provider Qwikcilver, has today announced that it has raised $10 million in its latest round of funding. The round was led by Sistema Asia Fund, the proprietary fund of Russian conglomerate Sistema.
Along with Sistema, existing investors of the company, including Amazon Asia-Pacific, Accel India and Helion Venture Partners, have also participated in this new round of funding.
However, the company has not revealed the exact amount of investment made by each investor. But, a source has revealed to ETTech that Sistema has invested around Rs. 30-40 crore and rest of the money comes from other investors.
With the help of this funding round, the company now aims to double the value of gift cards it sells to Rs. 4,000 crore in the current fiscal year. It is also planning to expand its business to international markets like Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia. For this, the company has also started tying up with brands and merchants.
Kirill Kozhevnikov, managing director of Sistema Asia Fund Advisor, said,
The commitment and pioneering role of Qwikcilver in establishing its strong leadership of the prepaid and gift card industry in India has been truly unique. The strong credentials and passionate team has helped build and grow a robust SaaS (software-as-a-service) product company in India.
Qwikcilver Solutions is a provider of end-to-end stored-value-card solutions to retail and corporate customers. It has a Software-as-a-Service model (SaaS), enabling customers to launch the stored value card program with minimal upfront investment and provides suite of services to create, deploy and manage and personalise the programme. Gifting, which is company’s marquee product, helps consumers and corporate clients to purchase gift cards and vouchers of numerous brands.
It has more than 150 brands on board, of which 30% are online players. Two years ago, online players accounted for 10% of the brands on its platform. With proliferation of online brands, Qwikcilver also sees the share of digital gift cards increasing to 60% in 3 years from current 20%.
It counts Flipkart, Cleartrip, Snapdeal, Make-MyTrip, Amazon, Hoopos.com and Yepme among its clients. The firm also sells gift cards of Amazon and other brands online.
Earlier, the company had raised $10 million in December 2014 from Amazon, Accel and Helion Venture Partners. With that funding, Amazon had acquired close to 15% stake in the company. Prior to that, it had raised funding from Accel and Helion in 2008.
Last year, Qwikcilver launched mobile gifting store named woohoo.in, which let users conduct transactions and gift their loved ones right through their smartphones. It offers choices among a whopping 150+ brands, both online and offline, spanning across more than two dozen gifting categories.
In the online gift card business, one of the major comptitor of Qwikcilver is Gift Cards India. Apart from that, it also competes against Giveter, Indiangiftsportal, Gifts2India, BuddyGifting, Wishpicker, etc.
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