Gobillion: Powering Social Commerce in India's Small Towns

Roshan Farhan and Kulapradip Bharali, IIM-NIT graduates, have co-founded Gobillion, a social commerce startup, with a mission to make e-commerce accessible to the next 500 million customers in tier II-plus cities in India. Growing up in small towns, with limited access to e-commerce services, the two close friends deeply understood the customer problem and decided to launch Gobillion.

Gobillion, provides grocery products at the best prices when customers group buy together socially in the app.

"Our personal experiences with e-commerce and retail in small towns and deep understanding of the needs of customers in these underserved markets led us to launch Gobillion," said Roshan Farhan.

"We launched our operations from Guwahati and are now scaling across India. The focus is on providing value to underserved tier II+ markets and our TG is lower to middle income customers."

Gobillion is a YCombinator backed startup. It raised $2.9 million in a seed round in Oct 2021 led by marquee global investors including YCombinator, Justin Mateen, Pioneer Fund and Soma Capital.

"We have an inventory holding model - we source directly from manufacturers/super stockists for unlocking the best prices. Customers get upto 80% off on their grocery purchases, and we deliver the orders to the customer's doorsteps". The founders have worked with global organizations like Deloitte US, EY, Accenture and SAP Labs, where they had the exposure to know about e-commerce operations and the intrinsic challenges in the business models.

Gobillion recently was awarded Entrepreneur India's Best Consumer Internet Startup 2022 in India. The company aims for a $100 billion social market opportunity in India and southeast Asia by 2030. "Gobillion is growing at 60 per cent-plus monthly in GMV over 10 months, it is now operational in Guwahati and Kolkata and we will be launching our platform in 10-12 cities over the next 1.5 years," added Farhan.