The small business savior Rajat Shikhar, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, DealShare

DealShare was founded by Vineet Rao, Sourjyendu Medda, Sankar Bora, and Rajat Shikhar in September 2018 in Jaipur. Currently, it is headquartered out of Bangalore. Targeting Middle to lower middle class with a monthly household income of Rs 20,000 – Rs70,000 DealShare offers a high frequency, high relevance essentials like groceries, fruits & veggies, FMCG & general merchandise. 70% of its sales are mainly from local & regional brands. Incubated at the office of Cardekho in Jaipur, DealShare raised its first funding in October 2018 with a Seed round of 24 Million INR. DealShare is currently present in 160 cities/towns across 8 states namely Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Haryana, and Telangana.

The social commerce platform has been built for tier two, and tier three city users, while sharing relevant catalogs with the masses of India. The platform focuses on essentials and commodities like grocery, which is of daily consumption. Through a few thousand products, they built a sharp catalog and simplified the whole experience. The founders were partly inspired by how Wechat was of use to e-commerce companies in China and first started making inroads via Whatsapp. Later on, they shifted to an app. With this, the company was unit economics focused from day zero. They started DealShare Dost program, which basically employs micro-entrepreneurs in tier two, and tier three of India. And they built technology around that to enable them to make sure they're on-boarded and they're able to fulfill those orders and they're able to do reconciliation and get their payment. The relevancy of the catalog with local products sourced from local brands and local manufacturers made it a success. They built a procurement model where they have hubs, and procure goods from the suppliers and they cater and do deliveries on their own.

Dealshare also has a B2B business, which actually caters to Kirana. Rajat Shikhar, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, DealShare shares, "We started out of Jaipur since our thesis was to cater to tier two, tier three cities. So we knew to not start out of a metro city. So, after Jaipur, we expanded to all the tier three, and tier four locations out of Jaipur." They work on a hub and spoke model. For example, if Rajaststan is the hub, they will serve locations like Kota, Udaipur, etc. That's how we map the entire region.

Talking about the challenges he says, "Every region of India has low to medium income group customer who has a relevant audience in our offering. The question here is whether we can figure out geographically, what is the most optimum way of serving them. And second, whether we have enough partners in those zones and brands which have a decent amount of inroad in the local consumption story?"

As per Rajat, in the next five to six months, they should have at least one to two regions, profitable. The company also is capitalizing on the power of private labels launching them across categories.

Tech Stack

• current revenue

$700Mn Annual Gross Revenue Run Rate

• Number of customers currently on the platform

20million – ever installed base; 3 million monthly active users

• orders served in a day across India

4 lakh orders daily

• total funding raised

$330 million

• current valuation

$ 1.66 billion

• Number of employees

Onroll - 1,460 employees

Offroll + Interns-190

• Number of products in the private label category

~150