National, 17th October 2022: Gurugram -headquartered Online-to-Offline(O2O) local marketplace startupOhLocal, which has built a first-of-its-kind tech-enabled platform to connect local buyers and sellers on a real-time basis, has announced raising an undisclosed amount of pre-seed investment from a clutch of marquee angel investors and VCs. Among some of the prominent investors who participated in this pre-seed round were – Sunil Kumar Singhvi from JITO Angel Network; Harish Menon, Co-Founder of House of Alpha Wealth Management; Puneet Verma, Partner at Aquilo LLP; and Sahil Goel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of MiH Ventures.
Prior to this, OhLocal had raised another pre-seed round last year led by India Accelerator, the funds from which were being used by them to improve the OhLocal platform and onboard more sellers onto it. Going forward, the investment raised through the latest fundraising round (its second pre-seed round) shall be utilized by the startup to accelerate the OhLocal platform’s serviceability to 10,000 more retailers/local sellers across India, and continue to build a top-quality team, grow brand partnerships and further enhance platform’s capabilities in a bid to enable 5 crore+ Indian consumers with better shopping experiences and more savings in the upcoming few years.
Speaking about the fundraise, Mr. Devashish Goyal, Founder & CEO, OhLocal said, “We at OhLocal are delighted to announce our second pre-seed fundraiser, and are extremely glad to receive backing from a number of renowned investors. This funding round will enable us to provide OhLocal’s partnered sellers with a more robust platform while also helping them to run ads, manage their inventory, and insights through analytics, and increase their business margins by up to 20 percent. Not just will the investment help us at OhLocal in external and internal capacity building, but it will also aid us in team-building, tech, and product optimization. In the long run, we aspire to continue to provide optimal value-addition to the growing pool of OhLocal- associated sellers, brands, and customers.”
Investor Sahil Goel, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, MiH Ventures says, “OhLocal is solving problems for the larger Bharat by creating avenues for local merchants and at the same time helping consumers make the right choices. From offering competitive prices from the sellers to reducing delivery times to less than 60 minutes, OhLocal is at the forefront of enabling and empowering local buyers as well as sellers. I am super excited to be a part of their journey in building a new-age shopping experience.”
Investor Sunil Kumar Singhvi adds, “With the rapid digitization of the economy it is imperative that hyper-local businesses integrate themselves to the digital economy. OhLocal is perhaps the best place to address this problem with its developed strategy and technology. OhLocal is channelizing a network of hyper-local merchants and at the same time, empowering the buyers by putting the control of purchase in their hands.”
Through its unique business model, OhLocal is improving the consumer experience drastically by helping them get the best of both worlds vis-à-vis both online and offline shopping and promoting local retail businesses across various parts of India. Notably, OhLocal’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled unique online-to-offline marketplace has eliminated the tedious process of hopping multiple websites or stores for today’s consumers while allowing them to have better product discovery, availability, and the best prices through its flagship feature of reverse auction (bidding) and thereby making OhLocal India’s very first platform that is bridging the gap between online and offline commerce. OhLocal is a startup supported by Pedal Start – an accelerator community platform.
As of today, OhLocal has partnered with around 800+ sellers across 5 cities in India, generating business opportunities of ~ INR 5.2 Cr for the sellers and with 2000+ ads running on the OhLocal platform from these sellers across various cities. Bolstered by the current fundraising round, in the near future, OhLocal plans to soon venture into 5 more cities and aims to generate business (GMV) of INR 50 Cr+ for its sellers in the next 10 months or so. The startup is also working towards its foray into introducing a subscription model for sellers and hiring and onboarding more senior-level people as a part of its management roles.
About OhLocal
Founded in October 2020, OhLocal is India’s first-of-its-kind ‘Online-to-Offline’ local marketplace that is connecting local merchants with consumers in their respective cities via an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based smart, real-time bidding platform by offering prices competitive against e-commerce players. OhLocal is driving and leading the #Vocal4Local initiative of the Government of India from the front; they are doing so by reversing the entire process of e-commerce which leads to better prices and more effective product discovery and availability in the local market, wherein a product is requested by a buyer.
The OhLocal platform is bridging the gap between local sellers and buyers in a specific city/location while also parallelly transforming for the better the old or traditional ways of doing shopping. Using the OhLocal app or the website, one can get prices from multiple local sellers before buying any product. OhLocal showcases real-time prices against a certain product’s online price from multiple local sellers within just 60 minutes. Their unique business model entails value creation and a win-win-win scenario for all three parties involved across the new-age commerce ecosystem, i.e. end-users (customers), brands, and sellers.
