Craftsvilla.com gets Rs 100 cr funding; expects to touch Rs 600 cr in GMV sales next fiscal

Craftsvilla.com, online marketplace for ethnic products, announced that it has secured Rs 100 crore in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and GFC. The company plans to utilise the funds to expand its team in India, and to invest in scaling its technology platform. [caption id=“attachment_2209404” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “]  Representational image[/caption] “We are now facilitating over 100,000 transactions per month, and growing rapidly. This Series B funding will help us in building a brand, and in investing in technology to serve our merchants and customers better. We are aspiring to be 10x our current size by the end of this year, with 20 million products on our platform,” said Monica Gupta, COO and Co-Founder of Craftsvilla.com. The company stocks close to 2 million ethnic products from more than 12,000 artisans and designers across categories including, clothing, handicrafts, jewellery and art among others from all over the country. The best sellers are sarees, salwar suits and jewellery, followed by home furnishing and handicrafts. “Most of our sellers are housewives or small-time artisans who have been coming on Craftsvilla.com through word-of-mouth recommendations. As we are an ethnic-only marketplace, we do not allow sellers who sell non-Indian or branded products,” says Manoj Gupta, CEO of Craftsvilla. The marketing is mostly done through social media, blogs and search engines. “We believe that e-commerce is growing at a great pace and now is the time to build the right foundation for future exponential growth. We have achieved profitability as our first step in building that foundation,” says Gupta. Craftsvilla, who sees Snapdeal, Flipkart and Amazon as its horizontal competition, garners 65 percent sales from South India. The company, which closed at Rs 90 crore GMV sales last year, targets Rs 500-600 crore in the next fiscal.