ShopClues raises Series E funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion

Mass-market online retailer ShopClues.com has raised an undisclosed amount in Series E funding, led by Singapore's largest sovereign wealth fund GIC. Existing investors, including Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners  also participated in this funding round.

With this deal, ShopClues' valuation stands at over $1.1 billion. The Indian company will use the capital to strengthen its tech backbone, logistics infrastructure and on-boarding more merchants.

''As a long-term investor, GIC believes in the strong growth potential of India's e-commerce industry. We are confident that ShopClues' merchant-first mind-set and solid management team will enable the company to expand its reach, especially in the Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, bringing its unique value proposition to even more consumers and merchants,'' said GIC's head of Asia Equities Research Ravi Balasubramanian.

''The recent addition of GIC and the continued strong support from our existing investors is a validation of our capital efficiency with a clear path to profitability. This investment will enable us to double our focus on digitizing our merchants' businesses so that they scale to fully leverage the opportunity online commerce provides them,'' said ShopClues Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Sanjay Sethi.

ShopClues' gross merchandise value has grown more than four-fold since January 2015, and the business is shipping out over 3.5 million items every month. It gets more than 100 million visits a month.

The business growth is accompanied by strong improvements in capital efficiency and expects to be profitable by the first half of 2017. The company continues to empower  sales of more than 3.5 lakh registered SME merchants, and has launched multiple new services for seller marketing in the past one year.

''Today, we are the dominant player in low price-point and unstructured categories such as lifestyle, home, kitchen, electronic and automotive accessories among others," said Radhika Aggarwal, ShopClues co-founder and chief business officer.

Aggarwal added, "Our focus on selection, value and trusted shopping for Indian middle class consumers has given us tremendous scale with a rapidly growing buyer and merchant network. We are confident that our capital efficiency and execution will make this our last fund raise before we become profitable with the eventual IPO in 2017.''

ShopClues was founded in 2011 by Silicon Valley entrepreneur and wall-street analyst Sandeep Aggarwal, who bootstrapped the company with his own funds and angel money raised from friends and family till the first institutional raising of $4 million in January 2012.