Hyper local mobile marketplace Zopper raises $20M from Tiger Global, Nirvana Venture

Delhi-based Solvy Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd, the company behind hyper local mobile marketplace Zopper, has raised $20 million (Rs 127 crore) in its second round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global Management and Nirvana Venture Advisors.

The capital raised from this round will be used to expand its presence across 30 cities. It will also be deployed for strengthening the company's team and boosting its technical infrastructure, as per a press statement.

"With the second round of funding, we wish to fortify our presence in the major cities of India and rope in more retailers to give them higher visibility and provide a satisfying experience to our patrons," said Neeraj Jain, co-founder and CEO, Zopper.

In 2014, Zopper (which was then called Reviews42) had raised $5 million (Rs 30.5 crore) in an institutional round of funding led by Tiger Global with participation from Nirvana Venture Advisors and Blume Ventures. Following the investment, the startup rebranded itself as Zopper.com to expand its scope of operations beyond product reviews.

Founded in 2011 by Surjendu Kulia and Neeraj Jain, Zopper is now a mobile-app only startup that lets its users explore a range of products under various categories including computers and accessories, mobile phones, home appliances, apparels and accessories, baby products, kitchen ware and more from local physical stores. It connects users to local offline retailers.

The company had struck a partnership with Citrus Pay recently to enable product purchase directly from its app. Zopper currently features over 5,00,000 offline retailers.

In 2013, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in Series A from Nirvana Venture Advisors, Canaan India MD Rahul Khanna (who had invested in his personal capacity and now runs a separate venture debt firm) and a few other undisclosed individual investors.  Blume Ventures had also participated in this round. Before that, Zopper had secured an undisclosed amount in funding from Blume Ventures and VenturEast Partners in June 2012.

Tiger Global is one of the most prolific investors in the Indian technology/internet space.  It has closed several early-stage deals since January in emerging segments such as electric motorbikes (Ather), on-demand local services (Grofers, LocalOye); financial technology (Moneyview); education technology (Vedantu, CultureAlley); digital media (Culture Machine, News In Shorts); and mobile gaming (Moonfrog Labs) among others.