Pune: GullyBuy Software, a Pune-based software startup, today announced that it has closed Rs. 4 crores in Pre-Series A funding from SEED Enterprises LLP and a few individual investors.
GullyBuy provides a unique digital hyperlocal marketplace solution that enables buyers to order online from nearby/city stores selling groceries, food/eateries, medicines, and many other categories of daily necessities. GullyBuy’s USPs are store empowerment as a key business objective and an asset-light business model designed for rapid scale.
SEED Enterprises LLP is a niche family office investment firm of Avinash Sethi, Mitesh Bohra and Siddharth Sethi, the founders of InfoBeans Technologies, a highly successful NSE listed IT Services firm. Siddharth Sethi, Co-Founder & CEO of InfoBeans, and who joins the GullyBuy Board, explains that “While offline-to-online retail solutions are proliferating, we decided to back GullyBuy because of their vision of empowering local stores, a segment that has been underserved by the digital economy. Others either enable standalone online stores or are logistics apps that bypass stores, while the e-commerce giants’ strategy is to effectively make them their agents.
The GullyBuy team is very talented and experienced, and we are confident of their ability to deliver. This is our second investment with the founders of GullyBuy, the first one being Sapience where we had a successful exit to the NEXT Investors’ (Credit Suisse) funded Sapience Corp in the US.”
GullyBuy’s mobile apps are aligned to the informal nature of the regular buy-sell transactions with local stores. Users experience a simple Order-Pay-Pickup/Delivery workflow, made progressively simpler as the app learns user order patterns. Stores come online ready to receive orders instantly after downloading the Vendor App. They can opt for product listing, offers, discounts etc. at their own pace. The store app is free (no fees, commissions) and payment is directly from buyers to them.
Says Shirish Deodhar, Co-founder, GullyBuy Software, “We are delighted by the confidence placed by SEED. The funding will help our Sales/Marketing team to promote the app more aggressively and Engineering to accelerate the product roadmap. This space has unlimited potential but is also highly competitive, and hence we continue to seek more funding.”
“We chose to release our apps with basic functionality to validate the market. A steady stream of innovations is in the pipeline. They include Machine Learning based app recommendations, analytics, links for Delivery Partners and Brand promotions, and language choice. We are also working on a concept called GullyShop, which will be very beneficial to stores,” avers Swati Deodhar, Co-founder.
