P2P ecommerce platform CityMall secures seed funding

Cmunity Innovations, which owns peer-to-peer referral ecommerce platform CityMall, has raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by venture capital firm Elevation Capital. 

The round also saw participation from Waterbridge Ventures, Arun Tadanki’s private syndicate on LetsVenture, the company said in a statement. 

CityMall will use the fresh capital to expand its supply chain tailored for smaller tier III and IV cities in India, apart from building a core team. 

The Gurugram based company last raised an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors in October 2019.

Founded in 2019 by Angad Kikla and Naisheel Verdhan, Citymall claims to have developed a community commerce platform for everyday products. 

Kikla, a IIT Delhi and IIM Indore graduate had previously co-founded Hawkr, B2B ecommerce startup in the same space. Verdhan, an IIT Roorkee graduate, has previously co-founded Codalyze, a software services firm and had worked at BARC as a computational materials scientist. 

“The next 300mn internet users, living in smaller cities, towns and villages have a fundamentally different behavior than the first 100mn users. They are native to social platforms like WhatsApp and prefer buying from someone they trust. For that reason, community led ecommerce is unique as it solves two distinct problems – one creating a layer of trusted community leaders and secondly, disrupting two most significant cost elements of any ecommerce business – customer acquisition and logistics,” Kikla said

“With this funding, we are looking to deepen supply chains in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities and introduce new categories such as fresh, grocery and FMCG. We are also confident of expanding our network further in tier 2, 3 and 4 cities in states such as Haryana,” he added.

In the past six months, CityMall claims to have achieved 12 fold growth in revenue and established a presence in smaller towns and cities of Rewari, Dharuhera, Pataudi, Sonipat, Bahadurgarh to name a few.