Bangalore-based flipkart.com, India’s largest online bookstore founded by two former colleagues at Amazon.com — Sachin and Binny Bansal — has now got Series-C VC funding from its existing investor, UK-based Tiger Global, of the order of $20 million to back up its growth plans in India. With the latest round of funds inflow, Flipkart now has a total funding of $31 million.
Flipkart has recently acquired weRead.com, the largest social network-based book recommendation and review platform, for an undisclosed sum and also forayed into online sales of electronics, mobile phones and CDs/DVDs of music, movies, games and software. “And the present funding will be used to significantly ramp up supply chain capacity, upgrading technology capabilities and expanding marketing initiatives,” Sachin Bansal, CEO, Flipkart, told Financial Chronicle.
Significantly, the recent weRead acquisition allows Flipkart to leverage advanced recommendation technologies and social graph information to enhance customer experience. With more than three million readers and 60 million books, weRead captures user-generated information such as who, within one’s social network, has marked a book as a favourite, detailed reviews and user ratings of books.
Binny Bansal, COO, Flipkart, said, “e-commerce has already crossed the tipping point in the country and we are witnessing huge growth in the industry. Having already established ourselves as leading players, we expect to pick up a large share of the growing e-commerce pie.”
Source: My Digital FC