FirstCry backed GlobalBees raises $150 mn to build Thrasio-style house of brands

Online first baby products retailer’s GlobalBees, India’s largest Thrasio-style house of brands venture for direct to consumer (D2C) brands and online sellers, has raised $150 million (Rs 1,124 crore) in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A round of funding. 

As part of the round led by FirstCry and a few of its backers, Lightspeed Venture Partners came in as a new investor. Other investors in the round include Vikas Agnihotri of SoftBank, Harsha Kumar of Lightspeed, Atul Gupta of PremjiInvest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures and Kshitij Sheth of ChrysCapital. All of them will also join the GlobalBees board. 

GlobalBees was launched by FirstCry early this year with a corpus of $75 million. It looks to partner digitally native brands with a revenue rate of $1-20 million across categories like beauty, personal care, home, kitchen, food, nutrition, sports, and lifestyle. 

The Thrasio-style venture, as per earlier media reports, was planning to add 30-40 D2C brands in categories outside its focus areas with an investment of $2-6 million per brand. GlobalBees is already in the process of integrating 10 plus digitally native brands in the country, as per the release. 

“Indian brands have shown great promise in recent years, and we believe that GlobalBees is building great assets to accelerate the growth of digitally native brands in the country,” said Vikas Agnihotri, operating partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. 

Several aggregators of third-party sellers on ecommerce platforms, namely, Mensa, GOAT, Powerhouse91 and 10Club have managed to raise funding in the recent past.

Last month, 10club, launched by former Lamudi CEO Bhavna Suresh and two others, raised $40 million in an outsized seed funding round from Fireside Ventures and an undisclosed international investor while Powerhouse91 bagged an undisclosed amount of seed capital from US-based venture capital firm Crossbeam Venture Partners.  

In June, Cred founder Kunal Shah, BharatPe group president Suhail Sameer and other marquee angel investors invested in a Thrasio-style startup.

However, not too many third party sellers or D2C startups are keen on hopping onto this bandwagon, as per a VCCircle analysis