Amazon acquires first Indian social commerce startup, GlowRoad

Amazon India on Friday confirmed the acquisition of GlowRoad, a women-focused social commerce company. This is the first investment ecommerce giant Amazon has made to grow its social commerce vertical in India.

Though the transactional details of the acquisition have not been revealed, several media reports suggested that GlowRoad was valued at $75 million in this deal.

TechCrunch and Economic Times reports also suggested that Amazon acquired the company in an all-cash deal.

Amazon believes that the move will help the company achieve its goal to digitise 10 million businesses by 2025.

“Amazon continues to explore new ways to digitise India and delight customers, micro- entrepreneurs and sellers and bringing GlowRoad onboard is a key step in this direction. Together with GlowRoad, Amazon will help accelerate entrepreneurship among millions of creators, homemakers, students, and small sellers from across the country. This acquisition will complement GlowRoad’s already loved service with Amazon’s technology, infrastructure, and digital payments capabilities, bringing more efficiency and cost-saving for everyone,” Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider.

GlowRoad was founded in 2017 by Sonal Verma, Kunal Sinha, Nitesh Pant, Shekhar Sahu and Nilesh Padariya. The founders of the company, cumulatively, held close to 50% shareholdings in the company. Founders Verma and Sinha owned a relatively larger chunk among the other founders.

The company has raised over $31 million to date, from marquee investors like Korea Investment Partners, Vertex Ventures, CDH Investments and RB Investments. Accel is the largest shareholder in the company, with nearly 19% stake, according to business intelligence platform Tracxn.

The five-year-old startup raised its last round in November 2020, when it raised $7 million.

GlowRoad is a social commerce network, which enables suppliers to sell their products to end customers through resellers across more than 20,000 pincodes in 2,000 cities. The company focuses on Tier II and III markets through resellers, who are typically housewives, temporary workers or students.

According to the company’s website, a reseller can make up to ₹20,000 per month if they sell close to 100 products a month. It claims to have over 6 million resellers on the platform.

The company competes with DealShare, CityMall and YouTube-owned SimSim. Meesho too was in the segment, but the company changed its business model to a full-fledged ecommerce platform. Business Insider