Venture Catalysts bets on omnichannel electronics retail platform GabbarDeals

PNR Retail, which owns and operates electronics retail platform GabbarDeals, has raised fresh capital from integrated incubator Venture Catalysts.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Pune headquartered firm will deploy the funds to ramp up operations, expand its services and forge new partnerships, according to a statement.

“When customers purchase a phone from an ecommerce platform, it takes at least 24 hours for the phone to get delivered. Taking into account the supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 crisis, the delivery can even get delayed by a few days. Through GabbarDeals, however, customers will get their hands on the brand new phone within two hours,” Piyush Raka, founder and CEO, GabbarDeals, said.

“We have made this possible by bridging the gap between online and offline retailers. This way GabbarDeals helps ecommerce platforms to cut down their logistics costs and offline stores to acquire a larger customer base,” he added.

The company was founded in 2014 by Niraj Raka, Piyush Raka and Poonam Gugale to trade in electronics, with a focus on mobile phones. While the firm was reportedly acqui-hired in February last year by Bengaluru-based ShopX, a business-to-business ecommerce platform for small traders, a company spokesperson told TechCircle that the deal did not go through.

The firm claims to have tied up with more than 30 mobile phone franchise stores to sell about 26,000 devices and 17,000 accessories, registering a gross merchandise volume of over Rs 50 crore so far, the statement said.

Bhavesh Solanki, the company’s chief administrative officer, aims to onboard over 10,000 mobile phone sellers on its platform, the statement added.

“Their (GabbarDeals’) omnichannel approach has proven to be effective and profitable, which gives them a winning advantage... We are confident that it will fulfill its vision of becoming the fastest-growing omnichannel platform for mobile phones in India and globally,” Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, founder of Venture Catalysts, said.

Set up in 2016 by Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Golecha and Gaurav Jain, Venture Catalysts has invested in at least 14 startups since January.

Last week, it infused capital in New Delhi-based Kaivalya Foods and Beverages, which owns and operates refreshment aggregator platform F5, and in Bengaluru-based Jobshob Tech, which operates MyKaam, a short video-based job search platform.