India’s leading ecommerce enablement company GoKwik raises $15m

GoKwik, an ecommerce enablement company aiming to democratise the shopping experience and increase GMV realisation for ecommerce businesses, has announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, which also saw participation from existing investors Matrix Partners India and RTP Global.

GoKwik previously raised a $5.5 million pre-Series A round, also led by Matrix Partners India, in September 2021. Its clients include marquee names in the Indian ecommerce space, including Mamaearth, Good Glamm Group (Myglamm), LimeRoad, EyeMyEye, Boat, OZiva, The Souled Store, Noise, VMart. The company has also recently partnered with online shopping site Fynd to power the online presence of some of the most iconic brands in India.

Founded in the post-pandemic era, GoKwik is the brainchild of Chirag Taneja (CEO) and Vivek Bajpai (CTO); Ankush Talwar (Chief Data Scientist) is also part of the founding team. During his stint as a CRO at one of India’s leading D2C brands, Bombay Shaving Company, Chirag had first-hand experience with a number of industry problems such as lower CoD conversion rates, RTO orders, rising acquisition costs, and more that he felt were commonly faced by the entire industry. This triggered the idea of GoKwik, essentially, to democratise the shopping experience by providing a tech and data science layer to increase the GMV of ecommerce businesses across India. This thinking all forms the basis of GoKwik’s ‘Merchant-First’ philosophy.

With its initial product offering, GoKwik has been solving two very crucial problems for ecommerce players including traditional, offline businesses, and new age, D2C brands and large marketplaces. These are Return to Origin (RTO) and conversion rates. GoKwik uses its proprietary AI/ML models to help reduce RTO orders and increase Cash on Delivery (CoD) conversion rates. Its checkout and UPI solutions help to improve checkout conversion rates, ensuring higher GMV realisation, increased profitability, reduced Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and increased delivery rates.

Chirag Taneja, Co-founder & CEO at GoKwik, said: “Ecommerce enablement players will play a pivotal role in fuelling the burgeoning Indian e-retail market, which is projected to reach $120 billion in the next 4-5 years. Conversion rates across the funnel and RTO are major pain points for any online retail business, and an ecommerce enablement player like GoKwik is best poised to solve these problems. This round from Sequoia Capital India is a strong validation of our promise, the hyper-growth of the business, and the scalable Product-Market-Fit (PMF) of our product offering. We are among the fastest-growing B2B2C businesses and are poised to redraft the traditional playbook by offering personalised solutions to improve overall conversion rates, register higher GMV with increased ROI, and provide protection against risks such as RTO to ecommerce and D2C brands.”

While GoKwik has so far been focused on solving conversion rates at checkout and post order, the funding will primarily be used to double the size of the product and tech teams, hiring best in class talent and subject matter experts, to enable the development of innovative products that increase conversion rates across the funnel, as well as make the existing offerings more robust.

A great enabler to being able to build a large team so fast at a time where the talent crunch has been so prominent has GoKwik’s remote-first approach, allowing it to handpick the best talent from across India and beyond. The company also plans to partner with more companies in the ecommerce and D2C ecosystem to support the overall internet economy of India.

On recently partnering with GoKwik, Aman Gupta co-founder and CMO of India’s leading audio and wearable brand, boAt, added: “GoKwik has been solving really pertinent problems like conversion rates and RTO for the online commerce sector. For the D2C opportunity to grow to $100bn by 2025, enablers like GoKwik are going to play a very pivotal role. We’re very excited to benefit from GoKwik’s solutions and looking forward to more innovative products from GoKwik.”

Ashish Agrawal, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India, commented: “We are witnessing stunning growth in ecommerce in India, specifically in social commerce platforms and D2C brands, many of whom Sequoia Capital India has partnered with. The sector will do >$50B of GMV this year. The GoKwik team has identified a brilliant wedge into this market to solve merchants’ pain points of cart conversions at checkout and high returns on COD. We believe that GoKwik will be an important enabler to the ecosystem, solving multiple needs of merchants over time.”

Rajat Agarwal, Managing Director at Matrix Partners India, commented: “GoKwik is on a mission to enable ecommerce companies to offer best in class shopping experiences to its customers while improving their conversion rates and margins. In a short period of time, they have achieved a clear product-market fit with a large number of top direct to consumer brands and other ecommerce platforms now working with them. We’re excited to double down on our investment in GoKwik and welcome Sequoia Capital India to the partnership.”