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Snapdeal will invest $250M in technology and building the brand: Kunal Bahl

By Priyanka Sahay

  • 29 Oct 2014
Snapdeal will invest $250M in technology and building the brand: Kunal Bahl

Snapdeal has just become the second Indian internet firm to cross funding milestone of raising over $1 billion. With Japan's SoftBank leading a large funding round and putting $627 million alone, Snapdeal is now well capitalised to take on the might of Amazon and much heavily funded peer Flipkart. VCCircle fired some quick questions to Kunal Bahl, co-founder & CEO of Snapdeal, on the latest deal, revenue milestone for the company and strategy. Edited excerpts:

Would it be fair to assume that a majority of the new funding will go to meet cash burn including marketing?

As of now, we are looking at investing $250 million in technology and building the brand.

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Your top two competitors Flipkart and now Amazon have an affiliate in-house vendor on their site. Do you have some plans of having a similar model going forward?

Snapdeal.com has always been and will continue to be a pure marketplace. We already have over 50,000 businesses listing their products on Snapdeal.com and aim to take this figure to 1 million within the next three years.

The horizontal e-com marketplace is getting polarized towards Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal. Where does that leave your strategic partner eBay? Is there any scope of consolidating the businesses instead of partly competing?

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eBay is still an investor and a strategic partner of Snapdeal.com. Owing to the vast experience that the company brings with it, we have a lot to learn from them.

Are there any fresh milestones in terms of sales?

We crossed a $1 billion (revenue run rate) in gross merchandise value (GMV) in August this year and the sales doubled in October.

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(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)

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