O2O platform Crownit raises funding from FreeCharge founders and others

Local merchant discovery and privileges platform Crownit has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from FreeCharge founders Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, and ex-Snapdeal CPO Anand Chandrasekaran.

Crownit, an online to offline (O2O) marketing platform connecting consumers and merchants, was launched in July 2014. Present in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, among other cities, it offers users cashback at local merchants.

The average ticket size of each transaction is around Rs 1,200 and the average age of the app’s users is between 22 and 35. 

Crownit claims to have over 9,00,000 users and has over 15,000 merchants listed on its platform. The target is to have 20 million users and drive an annual GMV of $1.2 billion across 25 Indian cities by 2019.

Sameer Grover, Founder and CEO, Crownit, said, “To be recognised and supported by some of the most successful tech entrepreneurs in the country is a major shot in the arm for us. It gives us tremendous confidence to see such belief in our business model and execution approach. We are building India’s largest offline deals company using app-only cost efficient cashback approach. We are replicating the success of Meituan (China’s largest offline deals company) in India.”

Sameer, a Delhi College of Engineering graduate, has had extensive experience creating and marketing software products for large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses both in India and the US. Since 2005, he has worked in India with startups like Apollo Health Street, MphRx, and Knowlarity.

Kunal Shah, Founder, FreeCharge, added, "Crownit has built a sustainable marketing programme for offline merchants. The consumer engagement of Crownit has proven that the product really works and has wide acceptance. At scale across 25 cities and 50k merchants, it will work beautifully.”

Crownit had raised $5.5 million in Series-A funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners in May 2015. In an interaction with YourStory earlier this year, it was revealed that over the past one-and-a-half years, Crownit’s customer base had increased from 25,000 to 8,00,000 users, listed merchants from 1,000 to 11,000, and also that users spend an average of Rs 5,500 a month on the platform.

Segment overview

This segment has witnessed a number of players like KeyPoint Technologies and fashion discovery platform Roposo and also InMobi’s platform Miip that aims to transform advertising into “moments of discovery” for users. Mumbai-based NearFox, a local lifestyle content and discovery platform also raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from a clutch of investors yesterday. 

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