Zopper raises $20 mn in series-B funding

Zopper, a hyper-local marketplace app for local retailers, has raised series-B funding of $20 million from Tiger Global and Nirvana Ventures Advisors.

Neeraj Jain and partner Surjendu Kuila have diluted equity to raise funding and the partners do not hold majority stake in the company, said Jain, co-founder and chief executive officer, Zopper. The app connects offline retailers to the online community and offers comparisons for products across categories. The funds, Jain said, will be utilised for bolstering Zopper's brand presence across 30 cities of the country, key appointments and technology to accelerate the growth of the company. Zopper is available in seven cities. It had raised $5 million from Tiger Global and Nirvana Ventures last June in the series-A round. The founders received seed funding in October 2011 from Blume Ventures and Ventureast and the second round came from Nirvana Ventures and Blume Ventures in January 2013.

The concept of hyper local is gaining wide popularity pan-India and part of the funds raised would be used for marketing Zopper.

"So far we have never spent any money on marketing but we plan to do that now. While we will be using traditional medium of advertising, we would also be reaching out to merchants in local market,” said Jain.

Zopper would also divert portion of the raised amount for expanding its employee base. Zopper is looking at hiring in the functions of technology, operations and marketing. It is looking at building a mid and senior management team taking its numbers from the present 20 to 40 by the year's end. Currently it has 120 employees on roll.

The company which was earlier looking at expanding its offerings in the categories it operates in, has now decided to focus on building an ecosystem of services around electronics, instead.  "Earlier the idea was to go horizontal in terms of the number of services offered, but now we have decided to go deeper into one category and provide better services,” said Jain.

The company will leverage its vast network of retailers as partners and will tie up with dealers to provide services of its electronic segment.

It was planning to expand into furniture and auto but that will not happen for now, Jain added. Zopper had the largest catalogue of online and offline merchants, a comprehensive merchant listings and wide price discovery. After contacting an offline merchant, a customer could go to the store to see the product, Jain said.