Deals platform Little raises USD 50 mn from Paytm, others

Founders of online clothing and accessories shopping platform Zovi, Manish Chopra and Satish Mani today said they have raised USD 50 million (about Rs 315 crore) in funding led by Paytm and will launch a mobile-only online to offline (O2O) marketplace for deals called Little.
Along with Paytm, a large "undisclosed investor", SAIF Partners and Tiger Global participated in the round, it said in a statement.
Little targets to be India's largest consumer lifestyle deals marketplace, it said.
In partnership with Paytm, Little will power the deals platform on Paytm and enable seamless payments when a customer bags a deal, it added.

Little will use the funds to build a robust merchant ecosystem in the country, hire senior-level talent and build new technology to focus on the Indian O2O market, which is expected to be worth USD 64 billion by 2016, according to industry estimates.
The Little application will offer over 50,000 live deals across 11 cities by March 2016. The company is already 400 people strong with strengths in technology, product and operations and expects to build a 1000 person team by March 2016, it said.

The app aims to be both a discovery platform for lifestyle consumers and a sales channel for merchants, providing a supply of real-time hyper-local deals to customers across services like, restaurants, movies, hotels, salons, gyms, spas and other services while creating a hassle free platform for merchants to market their services.

Little expects to hit a gross merchandise value (GMV) run rate of USD 170 million, by March 2016, it said.
"With Little, we aim to offer a real time, personalised and location-based marketplace which can offer contextual and purposeful deals as it learns one's usage habits," Manish Chopra, chief executive and co-founder of Little said.
Chopra along with co-founder Satish Mani will continue to build Zovi as a fashion brand with focus on men's fashion, marketing it on popular online marketplaces, as well as Zovi.Com, they said.