The former Infosys engineer who is helping offline retailers go digital

ShopX co-founder Amit Sharma has built an app that's offered on an invite-only basis. His firm already has 50,000 customers, and aims to take that number up to 12 million

The founders of this tech start-up are in no rush to acquire massive scale. The customer-facing app they have developed to connect small retailers with suppliers and customers isn't available on the android playstore, but is being offered on an invite-only basis through their firm's own marketing team. Yet, ShopX, the Bengaluru-based company that was founded in 2015 by Amit Sharma and Apporva Jois, both former techies at IT major Infosys, claims to have already become profitable, at least at the gross level.

“Having spent time in Silicon Valley, I wanted to bring the best practices about building a great product brand using technology to India. The idea was always to grow structurally rather than just increasing scale,” said Amit Sharma, CEO and Co-founder, ShopX. Before launching the firm in 2015 along with Jois, Sharma had had years of research and experience in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Silicon Valley, which he brought to India with the simple idea of reaching out to the small retailer.

ShopX, which enables retailers to offer their products and services along with daily deals to customers by listing them on its platform, also has Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani as one of its early backers. The company already has around 150,000 customers across 300 cities and aims to expand the base to 1.2 million over time.

Sharma completed his engineering in Delhi and was engrossed in research in the field of artificial intelligence quite early on. “I was in Infosys for many years and ended up becoming the lead inventor of a couple of patents in the US and Europe, and had published extensively in global conferences and publications,” said Sharma. He also completed his MBA during this period before coming back to India to launch the start-up.

In his previous stint as an engineer, Sharma designed and built one of the first Grid Computing Management Platforms in the world. This system combined the collective unutilised resources of thousands of desktops and laptops to build a massive computing pool that could be used for data and compute-intensive jobs. He also designed and built a pay-per-use software licencing platform for cloud-based applications. Sharma published his first international research paper at the age of 19, and has so far published more than 10 research papers in international journals and conferences.

It is this experience in AI that led the company to take a carefully designed clustered approach to market outreach. “We wanted to build a long-term sustainable product that didn’t need to depend on fund raising every year.”  

Instead of servicing a few retailers across many towns, the company identifies clusters of towns, gets its marketing team to approach retailers in these clusters and get them on board, after which the retailers are provided the app. Those who have signed up on the ShopX platform use the mobile application up to 20 times a month on average. While the platform can currently be used in four Indian languages, ShopX has a few more in the pipeline. In the next phase, ShopX aims to bring voice-assisted navigation on its mobile application, as it attempts to dive deeper into what the start-up thinks is a $700 billion space. While there are several dimensions to its expansion plans, including geographical and network expansion, the company is exploring digitisation of credit for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) customers.

“We have managed the B2B part of the business already and are now enabling the B2C part to connect with their end consumers,” said Sharma. The revenues largely come in through brands on the platform. One distinction that the company has envisioned is to give brands the power to market directly to the retailers instead of going through multiple intermediaries.

In the assisted e-commerce market, ShopX competes with the likes of ShopKirana and Peel-Works to bring the offline retailers online and leverage technology across categories like food and groceries, digital and electronic services. Using ShopX’s retailer facing app, a small merchant can offer his customers a range of services including making payments for mobile phone bills and DTH charges, booking travel tickets for customers, making bill payments and assisting e-commerce shoppers.

The platform also provides credit options to retail partners through ShopX Suvidha apart from a partnership with Amazon to connect small retailers. The company has so far partnered with over 100 consumer brands, including Hindustan Unilever and P&G.