Rare Bits Technology, the Bengaluru based parent of SaaS platform WINDO, has raised $500,000 in a seed round led by venture capital firm Unicorn India Ventures.
Angel investors Meena Ganesh, CEO of Portea; Aravind Sanka, CEO of Rapido; Srinivas Anumolu from Growth Story; and Vivek Bhargava, co-founder of ProfitWheel; participated in the round.
The capital raised will be used for product development, enhance customer experience and achieve product-market fit, and explore other international markets, Silus Reddy Chintapalli, co-founder and CEO of WINDO, told VCCircle.
Founded in 2020 by second time entrepreneurs Chintapalli and Rakesh Vaddadi, the startup claims to help small businesses and solopreneurs build their online store in under two minutes by converting their Instagram page into an online store. WINDO shop makes it easy for sellers to manage their online businesses by increasing orders and helping them set up a professional looking ecommerce store and market their products with ease to their Instagram customers.
“Before the launch, we interacted with several small businesses and realized that their technology needs are different from those that are available in the market. Building tools exclusively for them is a big enough market to address especially at a global level. We found perfect synergies between our vision and Unicorn India Ventures as we set out to build a global SaaS tech product company from India. Increasing digitization helps solopreneurs and SMBs expand their footprint and add new customers. WINDO aims to be the tech enabler in this transformation,” Chintapalli said.
The startup is targeting an annual run rate (ARR) of $1 million in the next 12 months.
The global social commerce market size was valued at $474.8 billion in 2020. It is expected to expand at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28.4% from 2021 to 2028, according to a report by Grand View Research. The market is expected to grow at a much faster pace than the global CAGR to reach $25 billion by 2025.
“WINDO’s founding team is an experienced one poised to leverage the boom in online consumerism. The goal of the company is to help sellers improve their conversion rate and make effective use of their Instagram content and drive sales of their products easily. The concept is very unique, and since then we have been closely working with the founding team and their approach to improve customer buying experience prompted us to invest in the company,” Bhaskar Majumdar, managing partner at Unicorn India Ventures, said.
Social commerce has been gaining a lot of tractin and investor interest in the recent past. Last month, social commerce platform DealShare received an approval from its stakeholders to raise Rs 204.5 crore (approximately $28 million) in a fresh round of funding from returning investors.
Naspers-backed Meesho, ShopG, Kalaari Capital-backed Shop 101 and Paytm’s MyStore are some of the other social commerce players in this market.
