CityMall secures $11 mn in Series A round led by Accel

Cmunity Innovations, which runs social ecommerce platform CityMall, has raised $11 million (about Rs 79.92 crore) in a Series A round led by Accel. Returning investors Elevation Capital as well as WaterBridge Ventures chipped in.

The company will use the fresh capital to strengthen its supply chain and logistics network, apart from expanding its presence to 20 new cities in tier II markets and beyond, according to a statement.

CityMall previously raised $3 million in a seed round led by Elevation Capital in November 2020. Prior to that, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in an angel round from the likes of Citrus Pay cofounder Jitendra Gupta, Xiaomi Indonesia’s general manager, Alvin Tse in October 2019.

Founded in 2019 by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, CityMall retails grocery, FMCG, fresh products as well as home and kitchen products on its platform. The community commerce model relies on micro-entrepreneurs in a given area to get a network of people to order on CityMall consumer app, thus aggregating the orders and helping with last mile logistics to customers.

“India’s next 300 million Internet users from smaller cities, towns, and villages depend on assisted commerce formats driven by pricing, trust and feasibility to encourage online purchase for everyday products,” Kikla said in the statement.

“The accelerated pace of our growth in the past 10 months is a testimony of our ability to create a sustainable and effective model to address the challenges faced by traditional e-commerce models in Tier II, III and IV markets of India,” he added.  

The platform plans on expanding its network to cover over two lakh community leaders or micro-entrepreneurs by 2022. The platform competes with Prosus-backed Meesho,which is the largest player in the sector and is reportedly in talks to raise a new round at a valuation of over $2 billion. Other players in the space include Vertex Ventures backed GlowRoad.

“Citymall's genius lies in their business model that not only serves the consumers but also has favourable economics that will ensure enduring wide-scale impact. We hope Citymall sets an example for Indian founders to innovate and serve the next 500mn Indian consumers while building very valuable businesses in process,” said Pratik Agarwal, vice president at Accel Partners in the statement.