Shopflo, a SaaS startup for D2C brands, raises $2.6M in a Seed round

Bengaluru-based Shopflo, a SaaS startup that enables easy checkouts for D2C brands, today announced it has raised $2.6 million in a seed funding round led by US-based Tiger Global and TQ Ventures.

With this, Shopflo becomes one of the only Indian startups at a pre-product stage to receive seed funding from Tiger Global. Tiger Global doesn't mainly invest in seed-stage startups. Better Capital and a group of other angel investors also participated in the round.

Shopflo has developed a platform that allows direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands to improve their checkout experience at their websites and improve conversion rates. The SaaS startup further helps brands to personalize these checkout experiences for customers.

“After speaking to more than 100 small merchants, we realized that there continues to be a gap in checkouts for smaller brands as compared to larger platforms, who own their checkout experiences," said Priy Ranjan, one of the co-founders of Shopflo.

Priy Ranjan, Ankit Bansal, and Ishan Rakshit co-founded Shopflo in September 2019. Currently, The Bengaluru-based firm has partnered with six merchants, including D2C brands and a rollup commerce brand. To provide checkout payment services, it has partnered with digital payment gateway firms Razorpay and Cashfree.

"Through Shopflo, we want to ensure that customers get the same checkout experience across all small D2C brands they shop from, and increase conversions for these smaller merchants. We are already seeing a 15% to 20% increase in conversions for some of these brands," Ranjan adds.

The founders of Shopflo have first-hand experience in the ecommerce, payments, and SaaS space. Before starting Shopflo, Priy and Ishan were at Elevation Capital, while Ankit worked at communications SaaS unicorn Gupshup.

With this round of funding, The SaaS firm plans to scale its product to 150 online merchants and process up to $300 million in gross merchandise value (GMV) checkouts in this fiscal year, the statement said. It also plans to expand its operations globally.

Speaking on the investment, John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, said, "A seamless checkout experience has become a baseline expectation for consumers. However, checkout for ecommerce merchants hasn’t changed much in the last decade. Shopflo will change this. It is well-positioned to be the default checkout for the fast-growing Indian D2C market. We are excited to be their first backers along this journey."

“Checkout has remained the most under innovated part of ecommerce for a long time. We are changing that with Shopflo, which is an innovative checkout SaaS to reimagine the buyer experience from the checkout page onwards weaving together payment, tracking, returns, and more like never before. I am excited to partner with the Shopflo team along with a stellar group of global co-investors”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar, CEO of Better Capital.

Shopflo says it is focusing on empowering D2C brands to provide experience to their customers, enabling merchants to maximize long-term value from visitors to their website. They are out of beta and live with select merchants, it adds.

Schuster Tanger, Co-Managing Partner, TQ Ventures, said, "Indian ecommerce is a megatrend. The checkout piece sits at the bottom-most part of the funnel with the highest intent customers. The Shopflo team impressed us with their depth of understanding of both D2C and payments SaaS. They are well-positioned to build the preeminent Indian company in this space, and we look forward to supporting them on their journey."

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