India’s largest Thrasio-style investment venture, GlobalBees has raised $150 million in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A led by FirstCry & some of its investors with additional participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners. This is the largest Series A funding round by an Indian Thrasio style startup in the country. With this round, Vikas Agnihotri of Softbank, Harsha Kumar of Lightspeed, Atul Gupta of Premji Invest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures and Kshitij Sheth of Chrys Capital will join the GlobalBees board.
With a focus on capital efficiency, GlobalBees looks to partner with digitally native brands across categories like Beauty, Personal Care, Home, Kitchen, Food, Nutrition, Sports, lifestyle etc. with a revenue rate of US $1M-$20M, which as per the company, is proof of a great product-market fit. India is seeing an uptick of smaller brands, with nearly 120,000 new vendors selling on Amazon India, of which around 4,200+ brands crossed Rs 1 crore in sales in 2020. These numbers present an excellent opportunity for GlobalBees to accelerate the D2C sector.
Commenting on the investment, Nitin Agarwal, Co-Founder & CEO, GlobalBees said, “GlobalBees aims to unleash the power of product innovation by Indian entrepreneurs and strategically partner with them to help them realize the full potential of their brand and products. Apart from capital, GlobalBees brings in strategic capabilities across Marketing & Growth, Technology, Distribution, Sourcing, Branding, Warehousing, Logistics, R&D, Product Development and Operations- all things essential to rapidly scale the brands in the digital space.”
FirstCry Co-Founder, Supam Maheshwari and Nitin Agarwal had earlier co-founded Brainvisa Technologies back in 2000. A brainstorming session around creating a vibrant D2C ecosystem & partnering with exciting fellow entrepreneurs brought two long time friends together to start GlobalBees.
“We are extremely excited to have a stellar list of investors on our cap table and we are looking partner with founders who have built brands based on unique consumer insights. The funds raised will play a crucial role in helping us scale these brands globally,” added Nitin.
D2C companies with their agile DNA have brought in a wave of value generation in the consumer space in India. With a backdrop of rapid growth over the past few years, direct-to-consumer brands in India have come to the forefront in 2021. GlobalBees is already in the process of integrating 10+ digitally native brands in the country.
“India is at the cusp of a D2C revolution with an estimated market size of $200 billion in the next 5 years. Indian brands have shown great promise in the recent years, and we believe that GlobalBees is building great assets to accelerate the growth of digitally native brands in the country,” Vikas Agnihotri, Operating Partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers, said.
“GlobalBees presents a unique technology platform to consolidate D2C Brands and massively scale them in India and the world. Chiratae is excited to support and invest in GlobalBees,” says Sudhir Sethi, Founder, Chairman, Chiratae Ventures India.
“Globalbees is deepening our partnership with Firstcry and is a strong validation of our confidence in the founders”, said Atul Gupta from Premji invest.
