The funds raised will be used by OhLocal mainly for tech enhancement, expanding platform serviceability, team-building and growth
Gurugram-headquartered’ Online-to-Offline (O2O) local marketplace startup OhLocal, which has built a first-of-its-kind tech-enabled platform to connect local buyers and sellers on a real-time basis, has announced raising an undisclosed amount of pre-seed investment from a clutch of marquee angel investors and VCs. Among some of the prominent investors who participated in this pre-seed round were – Sunil Kumar Singhvi from JITO Angel Network; Harish Menon, Co-Founder of House of Alpha Wealth Management; Puneet Verma, Partner at Aquilo LLP; and Sahil Goel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of MiH Ventures.
Prior to this, OhLocal had raised another pre-seed round last year led by India Accelerator, the funds from which were being used by them to improve the OhLocal platform and onboard more sellers onto it. Going forward, the investment raised through the latest fundraising round (its second pre-seed round) shall be utilized by the startup to accelerate the OhLocal platform’s serviceability to 10,000 more retailers/local sellers across India, and to continue to build a top-quality team, grow brand partnerships and further enhance platform’s capabilities in a bid to enable 5 crore+ Indian consumers with better shopping experiences and more savings in the upcoming few years.
Speaking about the fundraise, Mr. Devashish Goyal, Founder & CEO, OhLocal said, “We at OhLocal are delighted to announce our second pre-seed fundraise, and are extremely glad to receive backing from a number of renowned investors. This funding round will enable us to provide OhLocal’s partnered sellers a more robust platform while also helping them to run ads, manage their inventory, insights through analytics and increase their business margins by up to 20 per cent. Not just will the investment help us at OhLocal in external and internal capacity building, but also aid us in team-building, tech and product optimization. In the long run, we aspire to continue to provide optimal value-addition to the growing pool of OhLocal-associated sellers, brands and customers.”
Investor Sahil Goel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, MiH Ventures says, “OhLocal is solving problems for the larger Bharat by creating avenues for local merchants and at the same time helping consumers make the right choices. From offering competitive prices from the sellers to reducing delivery times to less than 60 minutes, OhLocal is at the forefront of enabling and empowering the local buyers as well as the sellers. I am super excited to be a part of their journey in building a new-age shopping experience.”
Investor Sunil Kumar Singhvi adds, “With the rapid digitization of the economy it is imperative that hyperlocal businesses integrate themselves to the digital economy. OhLocal is perhaps the best placed to address this problem with the strategy and technology it has developed. OhLocal is channelizing a network of hyperlocal merchants and at the same time, empowering the buyers by putting the control of a purchase in their hands.”
Through its unique business model, OhLocal is improving the consumer experience drastically by helping them get the best of both worlds vis-à-vis both online and offline shopping and promoting local retail businesses across various parts of India. Notably, OhLocal’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled unique online-to-offline marketplace has eliminated the tedious process of hopping multiple websites or stores for today’s consumers, while allowing them to have better product discovery, availability and the best prices through its flagship feature of reverse auction (bidding) and thereby making OhLocal India’s very first platform that is bridging the gap between online and offline commerce. OhLocal is a startup supported by PedalStart – an accelerator community platform.
As of today, OhLocal has partnered with around 800+ sellers across 5 cities in India, generating business opportunity of ~ INR 5.2 Cr for the sellers and with 2000+ ads running on the OhLocal platform from these sellers across various cities. Bolstered by the current fundraising round, in the near future, OhLocal plans to soon venture into 5 more cities and aims to generate business (GMV) of INR 50 Cr+ for its sellers in the next 10 months or so. The startup is also currently working towards its foray into introducing a subscription model for sellers and hiring and onboarding more senior-level people as a part of its management roles.
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