Social commerce has grown in recent times, with Facebook continuing to push more and more features on all its apps to become an online hub for shopping/entertainment. This has benefitted small scale startups as well, which are introducing their own features to compliment this new drive from Facebook. The latest of this batch is Bengaluru-based SaaS platform WINDO which has raised $500,000 in a seed round led by Unicorn India Ventures. The round also saw participation from prominent angels like Meena Ganesh, (CEO, Portea), Aravind Sanka, (CEO, Rapido), Srinivas Anumolu, (founder, GrowthStory), and Vivek Bhargava, (co-founder of ProfitWheel.)
According to the one-year-old start-up, the proceeds from the round would be utilized for product development and to enhance customer experience while growing. Moreover, the company also aims to achieve product-market fit and explore international markets.
WINDO helps solopreneurs and small businesses build their very own online stores and e-commerce websites from their Instagram pages in 2 minutes. It also helps sellers manage their online business by increasing orders, helping set up a professional-looking e-commerce store, & marketing their products easily to their Instagram customers. The start-up is currently aiming to achieve an annual run rate (ARR) of $1 million in the next 12 months. becoming a one-stop shop where sellers can control everything from the WINDO app by enabling features such as centralized inventory, order management, pricing, and others.
What makes WINDO, founded by second-time entrepreneurs Chintapalli and Rakesh Vaddadi, all the more useful is the fact that many small businesses and sellers use Instagram, which has become the go-to app for GenZ and millennial customers, as a platform to sell their products and services. With WINDO, the process has been simplified and made more effective for sellers.
The social e-commerce market, valued at $474.8 billion last year, is expected to expand at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.4% from 2021 to 2028, according to a report by Grand View Research. The market is expected to grow at a much faster pace than the global CAGR to reach $25 billion by 2025, spearheaded by Instagram and Facebook.
“Before the launch, we interacted with several small businesses and realized that their technology needs are different from those that are available in the market. Building tools exclusively for them is a big enough market to address especially at a global level. We found perfect synergies between our vision and Unicorn India Ventures as we set out to build a global SaaS tech product company from India. Increasing digitization helps solopreneurs and SMBs expand their footprint and add new customers. WINDO aims to be the tech enabler in this transformation,” Chintapalli said.
Silus Reddy, Co-founder & CEO, WINDO, said “We want to act as a technology team for solopreneurs and small businesses and help them build their online store in under 2-minutes by helping them convert their Instagram page into an online store, all while keeping it affordable & flexible. We believe that anyone, anywhere should be able to start selling online easily and we are working towards the same.”
