Retail tech firm Arzooo raises $70 mn from SBI Investment, Doordash founder, others

Retail technology platform Arzooo has raised $70 million in a new funding round backed by global and Indian venture capitalists including Japan-based SBI Investment, Trifecta Leaders Fund, and Doordash founder Tony Xu. This is Xu’s first India investment. 

Existing investors including Celesta Capital and 3 Lines VC also participated in this round. The company had earlier raised its Series A funding from Celesta and 3 Lines, followed by an investment from Zoom founder Eric Yuan. 

The latest funding will be utilised by the company to scale its technological might, with a focus on scaling stores’ growth, and market expansion. 

Khushnud Khan, co-founder & CEO, Arzooo said, “While we truly appreciate the interest from the investor community, we’re really glad to get onboard some amazing set of people with shared vision to transform offline retail joining the board.”

“While the last decade has been about the proliferation of new age economies, the Internet was still seen as a rival to offline retail and the retailer community has been at the receiving end for a while. Today, technology is making fast pace inroads into brick & mortar and we are excited to be at the forefront of this revolution while catalysing it by enabling the next generation retail for lakhs of neighborhood stores. Arzooo is essentially eliminating the barrier of size, scale and capital for medium and small stores while democratising retail in India,” Khan added.

Arzooo was founded by ex-Flipkart colleagues Khushnud Khan and Rishi Rathore in 2018 to transform offline retail. The Bengaluru-headquartered company provides retailers access to a wide variety of SKUs across leading and emerging brands. It is already powering 30,000 retailers.

Yoshitaka Kitao, Chairman and President, SBI investment said that Arzooo’s business model is “very capital efficient and can meet the increasingly diversified requirements of both retail shops and end customers”.

Lavanya Ashok, Partner at Trifecta Capital said that consumer durables and electronics is a “large category of consumption that is ripe for disruption through the efforts of companies like Arzooo, especially in non-metro markets”. 

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