Just like the name of his business, Pranay Chulet, founder and CEO of Quikr, accomplished the second round of fund-raising exercise in just over a couple of months from initiating the discussion with a set of investors.
India's leading cross-category classifieds platform, Quikr raised $90 million, majority of which was invested by Sweden-based Kinnevik, a growth markets-focused investment company.
"It did took a few months but we did not have to spend much time finalising this placement. I think like minded people always have a way to find each other and what worked for us is that Kinnevik has a good interest in the classifieds space. Besides, the fact that they know this business, they also liked what we were doing and it was a good meeting of minds," said Chulet.
Not following a stage-based funding, Chulet said it is a one-time transaction. "We don't believe in the practice of money coming in various tranches and it is a pretty straight-forward structure," he said.
Interestingly, Quikr's business model is unlike the operations of e-retailers like Flipkart or Snapdeal that raised huge sums from investors for business growth last year. It doesn't have to build a back-end, a logistics or for that matter warehousing set-up. Taking these aspects into consideration, why would Quikr raise such a huge sum?
Chulet said this was a big opportunity and it was sensible to have a long-term orientation to business. "India is a huge market and classified isa huge business. Even in countries that are 100 the size of India, there are billion dollar companies in the classifieds space. We don't get to know about them because classifieds business in India is still growing. If you multiply that opportunity 10-50-100 times it becomes a multi-billion dollar company. Given the size of the opportunity, we think it's better to go after it in the right way by investing in product, high quality talent and, of course, marketing," he said.
In terms of deployment, Quikr will use the funds to enhance its product offering that works seamlessly across desktops and range of mobile devices, mobile websites, apps etc. Of the 30 million consumers, over 50% use Quikr on the mobile platform. The company feels mobile users will grow significantly in the coming years and that the next wave will not be the technologically sophisticated set of users but those who are probably accessing internet for the very first time on their mobile handsets.
"Their screen sizes are smaller, they don't speak English, their affordability levels are different than ours and we are working towards building an entirely new product experiences for these set of users. How you would understand the Quickr website and app will be completely different from how a maid or a driver would and we need to rewire our thinking around this new wave of users.
"In the next two years or so, mobile users will be 80% of our entire user base. We will be aggressively working towards building the business and monetising it the right way," said Chulet stressing on over-investment on the mobile platform.
The company has close to 140 people across all functional areas and plans to more than double the number in 12 to 18 months.
As for marketing is concerned, Quikr has created a campaign of maximum selling price or MSP on its classifieds platforms for buyers and sellers to get a sense of the maximum price to be paid/ received for a product.
"Just like you have maximum retail price or MRP for new goods, we have created a cousin called MSP. This was necessitated because there is no guidance for buyers/sellers in terms of what price should they list it at when selling a mobile phone or a car. The MSP feature tells the buyer that s/he should not be paying more than a particular sum for a product while it tells the seller how much s/he should be listing the product at," said Chulet.
With the current placement, Quikr will not be looking to raise money for at least two years. Chulet said he is not concerned about further fund-raising for now as there may never be a next round. And going by the discussions, there is strong possibility of Quikr hitting the bourses, giving an exit to its investors in over a couple of years from now.
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