Dukan raises $11 million in Pre Series A funding

The round also saw participation from existing investors Snow Leopard Ventures, Lightspeed Partners and Matrix Partners India.

Venture catalysts and new venture firms HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorn as well as leading angels including Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, and Nothings Carl Pei also participated in the round.

Dukan’s current funding comes within a year of raising $6 million as a part of its seed funding round last October.

According to the company, it will use this fund to accelerate growth and strengthen the technology play by adding new people to its team. “This new investment allows us to aggressively expand our operations, while building our own 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 our monetization journey on a small merchant basis last quarter, and so far over 2000 merchants have enrolled in our Dukan Premium subscription plan,” said Sumit Shah, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Dukan.

“Premium subscription is one of the revenue streams, which contributes around 10% to our revenue,” Shah said.

Founded in June last year, Dukaan is a no-code platform that allows local stores and entrepreneurs to launch an e-commerce website and scale it to the internet. Every e-commerce website powered by Dukaan is customizable in terms of design and functionality. In addition, Dukan merchants can link their Unified Payment Interface (UPI) ID with the shop and start accepting payments through various modes of digital payments.

“Sumit and team have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to understand what SMBs need to be successful digitally and then ship products with incredible velocity to solve those pain points,” said 640 Oxford Ventures in a statement. “This round of funding will enable Dukan to be a worthwhile product,” it said in a statement.

Since its launch, Dukan’s platform has touched over 35 lakh small and medium-sized businesses and facilitated over 15 lakh transactions till date, the company said.

“There is a huge white space opportunity to meet the commerce needs of India’s 100 million small businesses and the Dukan team to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user Ideally positioned in India,” said Akshay Bhushan, Partner, Lightspeed.

Rajinder Balraman, Director, Matrix India, said, “Small businesses are digitizing faster than ever in India’s history and Dukan’s simple yet effective SaaS product has struck a chord with these customers and has enabled them to grow their business online. Made it.”

Dukaan actively competes with Sequoia and Tencent-backed Khatabook as well as Lightspeed and Tiger Global-backed OkCredit. Khatabook launched its offline to online platform MyStore in October last year. While OKCredit also launched an online storefront for grocery via OKShop last November to compete with Dukan’s current offerings.