Smytten Raises $6 Mn Led By Fireside Ventures The new investment will primarily be used for building many industry-first tech and data solutions to optimize the marketing funnel for D2C brands supported by the servicing infrastructure across the country for consumers to try products on-demand
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Smytten, a sampling and engagement platform for D2C brands, on Tuesday, announced to have raised $6 million in Series A led by Fireside Ventures. The round saw participation from SharrpVentures (Mariwala family office), Survam Partners (Suman Kant Munjal family office), and Waao Partners (Pratul Shroff family office). Existing investor Roots Ventures also participated in the round.
Smytten was founded by ex-Googler, Swagat Sarangi, and ex-Unilever executive, Siddhartha Nangia with a strong focus to digitize the pre-purchase product trial experience for consumers.
"Pre-purchase buying experience will be the biggest enabler and will fuel the burgeoning Indian D2C market which is projected to touch $100 billion in next 4-5 years. We believe this sampling-led tried-and-tested method of customer engagement will change the way D2C brands and consumers interact, making it more immersive and experience-based. Smytten is poised to re-craft the standard playbook of brand creation with the deep tech solutions we are building based on the trial intent and feedback from millions of consumers. It will empower the next generation of D2C brands with actionable insights and a captive audience to scale their business very fast. We are very delighted to partner with all our new investors on board as they bring in a wealth of experience on consumer brands that will help us create a robust D2C ecosystem," said Swagat Sarangi and Siddhartha Nangia, co-founders, Smytten, in a collective statement.
With more than 5 million users, Smytten is one of the largest direct-to-consumer sampling platforms in India and offers this convenience to online consumers to try products at the comfort of their homes at a very minimal or no cost before they decide to buy, the company claims.
"Smytten has worked out to be one of the most efficient, targeted, and data-driven sampling platforms for us as we aggressively scale our business. Our sampling ROI has been great on Smytten and it has helped us drive trials amongst a lot of first-time users for MamaEarth very efficiently," shared Varun Alagh, co-founder, MamaEarth.
Smytten today hosts over 700 D2C brand partners on its platform across varied categories and enables millions of product sampling every month for them. Many leading D2C brands like Mamaearth, Plum, mCaffeine, etc. are already leveraging Smytten's platform extensively to reach relevant users at scale and deliver first-hand product experience through sampling.
"With D2C becoming mainstream, brand marketers need fresh, sharper solutions that can help in creating the right brand experience for consumers who are on the lookout for superior quality products. We at Fireside believe the development of an enabling ecosystem presents a great investable opportunity and will be a big game-changer for the consumer brand revolution that's shaping up in India. We are very excited to partner with Swagat and Siddhartha as they create data-driven experiential solutions for brands to engage with the right users, based on very accurate behavioral targeting which helps reduce their CAC and engagement cost," commented Kannan Sitaram, venture partner, Fireside Ventures, and new board member, Smytten.
The new investment will primarily be used for scaling up the user base and building many industry-first tech and data solutions to optimize the marketing funnel for D2C brands starting from new product development to consumer acquisition and retention. Also, the platform is going to invest heavily in creating a best-in-class servicing infrastructure across the country, to widen the product trial touch points and strengthen the online service delivery to better the pre-purchase buying experience for consumers at scale.
Smytten had earlier raised an investment of $1.5 million in its pre-Series A from Roots Ventures.
"Smytten's revenue has grown eightfold since the time we invested. We strongly believe that the integrated approach taken by Smytten to solve the pre-purchase conundrum for consumers in the D2C space will see them lead a potentially $10B sampling and advertising market in the projected $100B D2C brand market by 2025. It also has a great product-market fit for large international markets like Southeast Asia and the Middle East making them the first port of call for every consumer brand," added Japan Vyas, managing partner, Roots Ventures.
