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.
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?
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.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)