FirstCry’s GlobalBees, a Thrasio-style enterprise, has acquired sustainable home care products firm The Better Home. This is the firm’s first acquisition.
Before to this acquisition, the firm had raised $150 Mn in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A led by the parent company FirstCry and some of the ecommerce unicorn’s investors. In addition this, Lightspeed Venture Partners has also invested in GlobalBees in what is one of the largest Series A funding rounds in the Indian startup history.
Post the acquisition, the 15 member core team that built The Better Home will join GlobalBees and continue working towards the firm’s initial goal. The Better Home products have so far been selling on Amazon and the company’s website.
The Better Home was initiated by its parent firm The Better India in 2020 by Dhimant Parekh, and is a D2C range of sustainable home-cleaners. The firm claims to have made deliveries across 600+ cities and towns in India and reached over 70,000 customers in its first year of operations.
Founded by Nitin Agarwal and Supam Maheshwari, GlobalBees invests in and buys seller
businesses on Amazon India, Flipkart and other ecommerce marketplaces. It is one of the early adopters of the Thrasio-like model in India.
Responding on the acquisition, Dhimant Parekh, founder of The Better India and The Better Home commented “Our vision at TBI is to leverage our massive community of over 200 Mn readers to build meaningful, impact-focused, scalable and ‘better’ businesses.”
“The Better Home will continue to further its mission in the world, and make every household’s carbon footprint a little lesser with this association,” he further said.
Massachusetts-based startup Thrasio was founded in 2018 and is valued close to $4 Bn. The ecommerce company’s model revolves around buying third-party sellers on Amazon in the US and supporting them to scale further.
GlobalBees is looking at a similar model and is looking to acquire 30-40 D2C brands across categories, Maheshwari said.
An Inc42 Plus report, titled, Indian Tech Startup Funding Report Q1 2021, shows that D2C and vertical ecommerce startups are fuelling investor confidence in the ecommerce ecosystem. More importantly, between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, the funding amount for D2C startups had registered a 93% average quarterly growth.
India is presently seeing a rise of smaller brands, with around 850K vendors selling on Amazon India. Of these, around 4,152 crossed INR 1 Cr in sales in 2020, as per Amazon. There are around 350K such sellers on Flipkart, of which 70 crossed INR 1 Cr in sales. This is the reason behind the fresh rise of Indian Thrasio styles startups. Other examples of such startups include Evenflow, and 10club.
New York-based investment firm Tiger Global has also reportedly backed a similar venture headed by Flipkart veteran Rishi Vasudev. Vasudev’s latest fashion and retail venture named GOAT Brands Labs, will acquire lifestyle brands and aid them build as well as grow online.
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