[REMOVED] Dukaan raises $11 million in Series A round funding

No-code DIY platform Dukaan has raised $11 million as part of its pre-Series A round of funding. The funding for the SaaS platform was led by 640 Oxford Ventures, which also saw the participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners, and Matrix Partners India as well as new venture firms like HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns. A number of high-profile executives also participated in the funding round, including Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal and Nothing’s Carl Pei.

“This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our team of highly skilled designers and developers. Additionally, this capital accelerates our ability to establish key strategic partnerships to grow our paying merchant base. We started with our monetization journey on a small merchant base last quarter, and more than 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukaan premium subscription plan so far," said Suumit Shah, chief executive officer and co-founder, Dukaan.

Dukaan will be using the funds to accelerate growth and bolster technology play by making new additions to its team. The move is powered by a series of funding which started with the seed round investment from Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Partners in October 2020, where Dukaan raised $6 Million. The company claims to be currently working with more than 3.5 million small and medium-sized businesses across India to start, grow, market, and manage their business over the internet in over forty business categories.

“Suumit and team have demonstrated a unique ability to understand what SMBs need to be successful digitally and then ship product at incredible velocity to solve those pain points. This round of funding will further enable Dukaan to build meaningful products," said 640 Oxford Ventures in a statement.

Founded in June 2020, Dukaan is a no-code platform that allows local stores and entrepreneurs to launch an e-commerce website on mobile phones and scale it online. Each e-commerce website powered by Dukaan is customizable in terms of design and functionality. Furthermore, the registered merchants can link their unified payments interface (UPI) ID with Dukaan and start accepting payments via various modes of digital payments.

Dukaan will be in the spotlight on how the company expands its operation in the wake of competition in the no-code platforms and unruly market situations due to the possibility of the COVID-19 third wave.