MagicPin, a hyperlocal discovery startup, has announced that it has raised $7 million in its Series B round of funding. The funding comes from its existing investor Lightspeed India Partners and Waterbridge Ventures.
Along with them, a $15 million venture fund floated by private equity veteran Manish Kheterpal and two global family offices, have also poured in money in the current funding round. Srivatsan Rajan, the chairman of Bain and Co. India; and Sahil Barua, founder and CEO of logistics company Delhivery, have also participated in the deal.
Commenting about the investment, Bejul Somaia, MD, Lightspeed India Partners, said,
The vast majority of commerce is, and will continue to be, transacted offline. MagicPin’s metrics reflect early but exceptional success in capturing smartphone-wielding users and directing their offline spend to participating merchants.
Prior to this Series B round, the company had raised $13 million in its Series A round from Lightspeed India Partners. MagicPin uses location intelligence to deliver discovery, recommendations, and rewards for local experiences.
The company says that the primary differentiator for MagicPin is that it also allows people to share their experience about a place they went to with a post and a picture. Anshoo Sharma, CEO at MagicPin, said,
This content inspires other users to get to know about other places and leads to intent formation. That is a virtuous cycle.
MagicPin, within three months of its launch in Delhi/NCR, claimed to have signed up 150K active users. In less than five months, the company covered 30K merchants across Delhi NCR region, Bengaluru, and Jaipur. The company was incubated at Lightspeed from May 2015.
The startup operates by creating online communities of users and merchants that visually capture and hence drive the local buzz, activities, and transactions. This enables them to help the communities discover trending events and interesting people in their locality.
