Flipkart announced that it has invested $4 million (about Rs 29 crore) in rewards platform EasyRewardz in India, giving Flipkart a 20 percent stake in the startup.
The move comes as the Walmart-owned Flipkart is working to enter the offline-to-online segment, as well as take on rivals such as Reliance Industries. For its part, EasyRewardz will use the new funding toward new product development, as well as global expansion. Founded in 2011 by Soumya Chatterjee, Tejas Kadakia, Angad Singh, and Sapan Kadakia, the company's last fundraise was $2 million in November 2017 from investors including TransContinental Venture Fund, Venture Catalysts and angel investors such as former PayU India exec Jitendra Gupta.
“We will now accelerate our global expansion to meet the growing demand of customer experience management platforms,” said Tejas Kadakia, co-founder and sales director at EasyRewardz, adding that “this new collaboration (with Flipkart) will help retail brands acquire customers and engage with their customers in a way which they have never done before in the O2O commerce cycle.”
Some of the platform's clients include RBL Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank Limited, Genesis Luxury, Spykar, Soch, Mufti, Rangriti, V-Mart, PVR, Himalaya Wellness, VIP, just to name a few.
CRM Software has a market size of $48 billion and is seeing a 16 percent year-over-year increase globally, with the Asia-Pacific region growing faster at over 20 percent, said Chatterjee, co-founder and CEO. He added that software adoption is fastest among SMBs in retail.
“Flipkart continues to make investments in the Indian ecosystem in order to deliver value to our customers. Our investment in EasyRewardz is part of our ongoing initiatives to give superior customer experience,” Flipkart said in a statement on the investment.
