Social commerce start-up Gobillion raises $2.9 mn from YCombinator, others

Group-buying platform allows multiple users to aggregate their purchases and place bulk orders.

Gobillion, a social commerce platform, has raised $2.9 million in seed funding from YCombinator, Pioneer fund and Tinder founder Justeen Mateen, who made the investment through his venture capital firm JAM Fund.

The start-up began operations in Guwahati in February and sells essentials like groceries in a group-buying, meaning multiple users aggregate their purchases to place bulk orders for discounts and offers. According to the company, its total market size is 400 million users spread across Indian tier 2 cities and abroad.

“We are probably the first start-up from the [Indian] eastern region to be selected in a YCombinator cohort as most companies to be selected from India are either from Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai,” said Founder and CEO Roshan Farhan. YCombinator is a US-based start-up accelerator that was among the earliest investors in companies like Slack, Airbnb, Stripe and Razorpay.

While Farhan left his career as a management consultant at Deloitte to start the company, his Co-founder and CTO Kulapradip Bharali was an IT professional at SAP Labs. Both the founders hail from Assam.

“E-commerce players like Swiggy and Dunzo have always started out from a Tier-1 city like Bangalore and then tried to replicate that model in Tier-2 and beyond. The idea with Gobillion was to launch in Tier-2 so that the blueprint itself is faithful to what those geographies need,” said Farhan.

The company is aiming to expand to Bhubaneswar and Kolkata in the next six months and plans to reach 12 cities in the next one and a half years. “Our user base is between 5,000 and 10,000 currently and our annualised gross merchandise value is around Rs 20 crore. The target is to grow the user base to 50,000 and annualised GMV to Rs 100 crore in the next six months,” Farhah told Business Standard.

The funds raised will be used for scaling Gobillion’s business expansion, launching more categories, and strengthening its operations, product development, and technology teams.