Online e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal has raised Rs 335 crore in Series J round of funding from Brother Fortune Apparel, a Singapore-based company.
Founded in 2010 by Bahl and Rohit Bansal as a deals site, Snapdeal, has become the biggest local rival to Flipkart. For 2014-15, the company has posted a revenue of Rs 938 crore with a net loss of Rs 1,328 crore, a five fold rise compared to 2013-14 when it posted a loss of Rs 264 crore.
The funding raised on January 29 was revealed in a document filed by the company with the Registrar of Companies. The company declined to comment on the story.
The fresh round of funding will help the company fight against home-grown e-commerce player Flipkart, valued at $15 billion, and Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos has committed $2 billion in investment for India.
Snapdeal had raised $500 million last year from SoftBank, China’s Alibaba, Japan’s SoftBank and Taiwan’s Foxconn even another investor e-commerce company eBay made a partial exit from the online marketplace. Its other investors include BlackRock, Temasek, eBay, Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Ratan Tata, among others. Snapdeal was estimated to be valued at $5 billion as of last year. Excluding this round, the company has so far raised close to $1500 million from these investors.
In a way it is not a surprise that the company has raised the funds from the apparel company. Snapdeal in December said that their fashion category has grown by 250% y-o-y and has attracted the highest number of users in 2015.
“The Women’s fashion category witnessed 220% increase in orders followed by Men’s fashion (130%) and kids fashion (100 %),” the company said in a statement. In Februrary 2015, the company had acquired Exclusively.com (formerly Exclusively.in), the online fashion segment for premium and luxury fashion brands.
Snapdeal claims to have more than 200,000 sellers, delivering to 5000+ cities and towns in India with 500 plus categories listed on its platform.