Cashkaro has raised $10 million in Series B funding, led by Korea Investment Partners (KIP) and existing investor Kalaari Capital, at a time when the online cashback and coupons platform looks to scale up marketing and customer acquisition in the run up to the festive season, a period in which e-commerce sales usually increase.
The Gurugram-based company said it will spend 5X the usual marketing budget in the next two months, while also hiring and investing in new products like Earnkaro, which allows anyone to become an affiliate marketer, promoting products on any of the 1,500 e-commerce businesses listed on Cashkaro’s platform.
“Businesses like ours stand to benefit from the growth of e-commerce and Covid-19 is leading to a lot of that growth,” said cofounder Swati Bhargava.
“Brands are also seeing more people coming online and want to capitalise on that, and are increasing their marketing spends as there’s a whole new base of shoppers they can capture.”
In previous rounds, Cashkaro had raised around $5 million in total, of which it raised $3.75 million as part of its Series A funding from Kalaari Capital and Ratan Tata in November 2015. The company said it has been quite frugal and had been reducing losses consistently over the past two financial years.
It said that the gross merchandise value (GMV) its partner retailers have derived from the platform has grown by nearly 400% in the last 18 months. Cashkaro is also expecting to grow its revenues by around 4X in the current financial year, while losses might creep up a little due to increased spending this year.
Bhargava said Cashkaro was positive about its strong performance in the upcoming sales as its own survey had shown that people were not looking to step into offline stores unless necessary, and that brands were also looking to divert marketing spends from advertisements to performance marketing.
“Gone are those times when brands have unlimited amounts of capital. Brands are more inclined to work on a cost per transaction basis,” Bhargava added.
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