Mumbai: Shopflo, a SaaS platform easing checkout experience for D2C brands,has raised $2.6 million in its seed funding from Tiger Global and TQ Ventures. Better Capital and a pool of other angel investors also participated in the round. This funding from Tiger Global makes a first of its kind for the investment firm for a start-up at a pre-product stage.
D2C merchants see a ~70% customer drop off between add to cart and purchase steps. This is the absolute last step of purchase and losing out on customers here hurt the merchants most. Shopflo offers a seamless and minimum cognitive load experience to the consumers, which helps in improving conversion rates while shopping.
Priy Ranjan, CEO & Co-founder, Shopflo said, “Most of these D2C merchants build their websites using no-code tools which are great for smaller merchants. The next best platforms are only suitable for large enterprises with in-house tech teams. We at Shopflo are targeting the merchants in the middle. We are starting as a checkout SaaS platform for D2C brands with a goal of creating a delightful and zero mental load checkout experience. We envision Shopflo to be the checkout layer in the global headless commerce stack. We are privileged to have Tiger Global, TQ Ventures and Better Capital join us as we plan to bring the D2C checkout experience closer to Swiggy and Amazon.”
The founders of Shopflo have deep first-hand experience in the e-commerce, payments and SaaS space. Priy and Ishan were at Elevation Capital interacting with D2C and Fintech companies respectively, while Ankit worked on a “Shopify for Restaurants” product at communications SaaS unicorn Gupshup.
“A seamless checkout experience has become a baseline expectation for consumers. However, checkout for e-commerce merchants hasn’t changed much in the last decade. Shopflo will change this,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Shopflo is well-positioned to be the default checkout for the fast-growing Indian D2C market. We are excited to be their first backers along this journey.”
Shopflo’s focus is to empower D2C brands to provide experience to their customers, enabling merchants to maximise long term value from visitors with their website. They are out of beta and live with select merchants.
Schuster Tanger, Co-Managing Partner, TQ Ventures said, “Indian e-commerce is a megatrend. The checkout piece sits at the bottom-most part of the funnel with the highest intent customers. The Shopflo team impressed us with their depth of understanding of both D2C and payments SaaS. They are well positioned to build the preeminent Indian company in this space, and we look forward to supporting them on their journey.”
“Checkout has remained the most under innovated part of e-commerce for a long time. We are changing that with Shopflo which is an innovative Checkout SaaS to reimagine the buyer experience from the checkout page onwards weaving together payment, tracking, returns, and more like never before. I am excited to partner with the Shopflo team along with a stellar group of global co-investors”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar, CEO of Better Capital, an early backer of breakout SaaS companies like Open, Khatabook, Teachmint & others.
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