Snapdeal sellers raise over $8M through its financing platform Capital Assist

E-commerce major Snapdeal has announced that it has enabled more than 150 of its sellers to raise over Rs 50 crores through its flagship initiative, ‘Capital Assist’, to accelerate and scale their business on the Delhi-based marketplace.

The Soft Bank funded company had launched Capital Assist in August last year just after its rival Flipkart partnered with semi government bodies to boost manufacturing and entrepreneurship in the country.

Capital Assist enables sellers on the platform by helping them meet their growing working capital requirement from a dozen banks and NBFCs, including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, RBL, Religare and L&T Finance among others as they scale their businesses.

The platform has significantly benefited the small and medium sized sellers on Snapdeal by enhancing their financial liquidity which has helped them increase their sales exponentially on the marketplace.

On an average, the benefitting sellers have doubled their turnover within two months of availing the assistance through this platform.

Speaking about this, Aakash Moondhra, CFO of Snapdeal, said, “We currently have 100K sellers on Snapdeal and are looking to scale this to 250,000 sellers by the end of this year and one million within the next three years. We realised that SMBs in India face major hurdles in terms of meeting their working capital requirements and raising low cost capital while attempting to grow their business. Capital Assist was launched in order to help our sellers overcome this challenge and we have seen early success towards the launch of this service.”

The company aims to empower more than 1000 of its sellers in the next one year through this platform. “We have also seen a positive response from the funding partners and we hope to extend the network to 25 banks and NBFCs by end of this year,” added Aakash.

Earlier in June 2014, Flipkart had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with FISME (Federation of Indian Micro and Small and Medium Enterprises) and NCDPD (National Center for Design and Product Development) to boost manufacturing and entrepreneurship in the country via infrastructural support in data analytics, marketing and customer acquisition to help them scale their business.

Besides these two e-commerce majors, leading online taxi aggregator Olacabs had also earmarked Rs.100 crores towards nurturing entrepreneurship among drivers to spruce up its supply ecosystem.

Of late, we have seen heavily funded e-commerce companies investing in technology, supply chain and attracting talent but now they are also investing to support small businesses, which will eventually bring more maturity to the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem.