Gurgaon based invexGO Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs on-demand concierge startup Qlivery, has raised $230,000 (around Rs 1.5 crore) from Hong Kong based Swastika Company Ltd.
In a statement, Rohit Pansari, co-founder of Qlivery, said the funds will be used for customer acquisition, ramping up the technology infrastructure and implementing artificial intelligence into the platform.
The new round of funding comes barely two months after Qlivery raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Chandigarh Angel Network (CAN). The startup also claims that it is in talks to close $4 million as part of its pre-Series A round.
“We started out with a problem statement that whether customers are ready to pay for convenience. New-age customers are pressed for time and struggle to find everything under one roof. They still demand an assortment of products available in the markets with the twinkling of an eye,†said Chetan Agarwal, co-founder of Qlivery.
Founded in June 2015 by Agarwal, Pansari, Karan Saharan, Sonal Saraogi and Shivani Agarwal, Qlivery is a cross-segment platform offering a range of on-demand concierge services that includes buying groceries, ordering food from restaurants, taking out photocopies, depositing cheques in banks, booking movie tickets and equipment repairs among others.
The startups makes money by charging customers a comfort fee for the deliveries, charging a fee from the merchants on its platform. Qlivery also plans to introduce a subscription based payment model.
Qlivery runs its own delivery fleet which collects and delivers items according to customer’s needs. It also allows customers to place pick and drop orders or task orders. The company’s delivery operations is executed through a mix of owned fleet and third-party delivery agencies.
Qlivery,which claims to have serviced 16,000 customers till date is currently operational in Gurgaon will expand its services to Delhi NCR by April 2016 and hopes to expand to Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Mumbai by the end of 2016. Qlivery also plans to tie up with various hotels and offices to provide on-demand concierge services to employees and travellers.
“Modern trade as an industry is approximated at $60 billion, which is only 10 per cent of the total retail market in India. Consumers' desire for comfort driven by income growth, urbanisation and attitudinal shifts is going to propel this industry,†said Vaibhav Jain, director at Swastika.
A number of concierge platforms have received investor attention. In January, Wishup, a chat-based concierge services startup, secured seed funding from 500 Startups, former Rocket Internet managing director Mato Peric and TracxnLabs.
In December 2015, Joe Hukum, an app-based provider of concierge services, raised an undisclosed sum in seed funding from TracxnLabs, Citrus Payments’ Jitendra Gupta and 1mg.com’s Prashant Tandon.
Last year, Lookup raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s personal fund, Khosla Impact, with participation from Biz Stone (Twitter co-founder). Also, Goodbox secured $2.5 million (Rs 16.5 crore) in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners while Goodservice received $1.6 million (Rs 10 crore) in seed funding from Sequoia Capital in June 2015. Haptik, Yellow Messenger and OK Sir are the other players in this segment.