With $11 mn in Pre-Series A, online platform Dukaan eyes expansion

Dukaan, a roughly one-year-old online retail platform that helps merchants deal with the pain points in setting up digital storefronts, has secured fresh capital to fuel its expansion plans. On Monday, the company said it has raised $11 million as a part of its Pre-Series A round of funding, led by 640 Oxford Ventures. 

The round saw participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India too. Venture Catalyst and new venture firms HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns along with prominent angels including OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal, and Nothing’s Carl Pei also participated as a part of this round.  

Bengaluru-based Dukaan’s current funding comes within a year of it raising $6 million as a part of its seed funding round in October 2020.  The company plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth and bolster its technology play by making new additions to its team.  

“This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base. We started with our monetization journey on a small merchant base last quarter, and more than 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far,” said Suumit Shah, chief executive officer and co-founder, Dukaan. 

“Premium subscription is just one of the revenue streams, which contributes roughly 10% to our revenues,” added Shah.   

Founded in June, last year, Dukaan is a no-code platform that allows local stores and entrepreneurs to launch an ecommerce website and scale it on the internet. Each e-commerce website powered by Dukaan is customizable in terms of design and functionality. Further, Dukaan merchants can link their unified payments interface (UPI) ID with Dukaan and start accepting payments via various modes of digital payments.

“Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMBs need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products,” said 640 Oxford Ventures in a statement.  

Since its launch, Dukaan’s platform has touched over 3.5 million small and medium-sized businesses, and facilitated over 1.5 million transactions till date, the company said.  

“There is a massive white space opportunity to service the commerce needs of India’s 100 million small businesses and the Dukaan team with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user is ideally positioned to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses in India,” said Akshay Bhushan, partner, Lightspeed.   

“Small businesses are digitizing faster than ever in India’s history and Dukaan’s simple yet effective SaaS product has struck a chord with these customers and enables them to grow their business online,” said Rajinder Balaraman, director, Matrix India.   

Dukaan actively competes with the likes of Sequoia and Tencent-backed Khatabook as well as Lightspeed and Tiger Global-backed OkCredit.

Khatabook had launched its offline to online platform, MyStore in October, last year. While OkCredit had also launched an online storefront for kiranas through OkShop in November, last year to compete with Dukaan’s current offerings.