Snapdeal raises $200 mn from Canada pension fund, other private funds

Online marketplace Snapdeal has raised $200 million (around Rs1,360 crore) in a fresh round of funding from Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP) and other private equity firms, the company announced on Sunday.

The company said it will use the funds to build up its capabilities as an online marketplace so as to better consumer and seller experience.

Snapdeal had earlier raised $500 million from a group of PE firms, including the Alibaba group, Foxconn, and SoftBank in August 2015.

Besides, the company had raised $100 million from Temasek Holdings and others in May lasty year, $133.7 million from eBay and others in February, $50 million from existing investors in June 2013 and $52 million in 2011 in separate rounds of funding from Bessemer Ventures Partners, Indo-US Venture Partners and others.

Snapdeal recently launched a multilingual platform for its mobile website, starting with Hindi and Telegu, with plans to add other languages, including Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam. The multilingual platform comes on top of Snaplite, launched a month back.

Snapdeal claims the new website is 85 per cent faster than the original mobile site, and that it is specially designed for users on a 2G connection.

Earlier during the year, Snapdeal had bolstered its business with the acquisition of  payments service FreeCharge, RupeePower, Unicommerce, MartMobi, Fashiate, LetsGoMo Labs, and Reduce Data. It also invested $20 million in GoJavas, a third-party logistics player in October 2015.

Snapdeal is also working on improving its seller side. In November last year, it launched Snapdeal Ads, a platform that offers targeted advertising tools for sellers. The same month it launched a professional service panel for its sellers allowing them to outsource support for various services like tax registration, cataloguing, business consulting etc.

Snapdeal said it has 275,000 sellers and, over 30 million products on its marketplace. It currently delivers to over 6,000 cities and towns in India.

Snapdeal's investor base mow includes PE majors like BlackRock, Temasek, eBay Inc, Premji Invest, Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, besides industrialist Ratan Tata.