Nowfloats, a startup which is helping offline businesses to get online, has today announced that it has received $10 million as an investment in its Series B round. The round saw investments from Iron Pillar and IIFL, along with Blume Ventures and Omidyar Network.
With new money flowing in, the company will now be investing money on sharpening its technology stack that drives customer support. The company aims to be a hybrid solution of automated and human interaction. Further, it is also planning to sharpen its services for the small and medium enterprises and expand further into tier-II and tier-III cities in the country.
Neeraj Sabharwal, co-founder of NowFloats said that SMEs need to talk about their businesses regularly in order to attract more customers online. He added:
Our product is geared towards making it as simple as possible for business owners to interact and add updates to their online identity.
He further said that there are also other players in the market which enable SMEs with an online identity that only aggregates basic business information and their product catalogue. According to him, this strategy does not drive RoI over a longer time-span as the content becomes non-relevant with time.
NowFloats wants to redefine the market for business websites, where the business owners only have to worry about the content on their website, and the technology takes care of other aspects including design, performance, discovery (SEO), marketing (SEM), enabling transactions (payment gateway) and customer lead management, etc.
Founded in May 2012 by Neeraj Sabharwal, along with three other co-founders, NowFloats claims that it has an instant presence across 2,30,000 business, out of which up to 80% are paid customers. The startup also claimed that it is registering more than 11 million unique visitors a month.
Earlier, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in its Series A funding from Blume Ventures, Mumbai Angels, and Hyderabad Angels. Last year, it also acquired chat-based commerce platform Lookup with an aim to increase its focus on the consumer side of its business.
