LoveLocal, India’s leading hyper-local e-commerce platform empowering local retailers, has raised $18m or INR 143 crores, in a Pre-Series B investment round that features some of the most prominent investors and founders globally. The round, which was oversubscribed, is led by Vulcan Capital, and also includes participation from Klarna Founder & CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski’s Flat Capital, Alumni Ventures Group and Commerce Ventures, Angel investors Nami Zarringhalam, Co-founder of Truecaller, Sriram Krishnan, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Anna Lambert, Director of Product Acceleration at Shopify, Sarah Jones Simmer, CEO of Found & ex-COO of Bumble, Arpan Sheth, Senior Partner at Bain & Company, and others.
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LoveLocal Team
Existing investors Blume Ventures, AC Ventures, HenkelX Ventures, Chiratae Ventures & Candy Ventures also invested.
Launched in January 2020, LoveLocal is revolutionising how India shops by empowering local retailers and digitising the $1.1 trillion unorganised retail market. LoveLocal has grown 40x since inception and currently serves 35+ cities across India, in just 18 months.
Akanksha Hazari, Founder & CEO of LoveLocal: “We have always believed in the local retailer. They win on every consumer consideration: service, quality, product selection, value, credit and free delivery. Local businesses account for more than 40% of jobs in India. LoveLocal is bridging the technology gap to ensure that our local retailers not just survive but thrive in India 2.0.”
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Indian retail is powered by 60 million+ local businesses. They represent 95% of the $1.1 trillion retail market. Despite the launch of e-commerce and new big box retail options, this unorganised market has doubled in the past 5 years. As over a billion Indian consumers move online, these local shops must transform to serve this new digitally-driven shopper.
Founded by Akanksha Hazari, LoveLocal’s Pre-Series B marks the largest round ever raised by a solo woman tech founder in India. This represents a huge step forward in the Indian startup ecosystem and comes at a time when less than 1% of Indian VC deals are invested in women-only led companies. Moreover, the country is grappling with a sharply declining female labour force participation rate, the lowest in South Asia.
In the next 3 years, LoveLocal aims to take 1 million local retailers online and power the largest hyper-local e-commerce platform in India. Hazari added, “The future of Indian retail is, and must be, local.”