Seoul-based investment firm Korea Investment Partners (KIP) has led a USD 10 million Series B funding round in CashKaro, an Indian cashback and shopping deals website. Its existing investor Kalaari Capital also participated in this round.
The company has raised a total of USD 15 million till now.
“CashKaro has seen incredible growth over the last two years, while consistently reducing losses. We felt that it was the right time to raise money and use it to tactically scale up marketing, open up new brand building avenues, user-acquisition, product development, and hiring new talent,” Rohan Bhargava, co-founder, CashKaro.com said in a statement.
Founded in 2013 by the husband-wife duo Rohan and Swati Bharagava, the company partners with online sellers and works as an affiliate channel to increase sales for e-commerce companies such as Amazon India, Flipkart, Myntra, Koovs.com, among others. On the other hand, it incentivizes users to shop from these websites using links from CashKaro by giving them rewards such as cashback and other offers.
When users purchase from any of these websites using CashKaro link the company charges e-commerce partners a commission, of which a portion goes to the customer who purchased the product.
CashKaro said it had partnered with more than 1,500 e-commerce websites across categories such as fashion, home accessories, medicines, footwear, and others. It claims to have over five million registered users on the platform who can earn as much as 50% cashback on their purchases. It said it processes over a million transactions monthly.
Last year, the company launched a social e-commerce platform called EarnKaro that allows users to make any shopping link into an EarnKaro’s affiliate link which can be shared on social platforms with friends and family. The user earns a profit once someone else makes a purchase using that link.
“Our new social cashback app EarnKaro was launched about a year ago and seeing its fast growth, we are all very excited to deploy more funds towards its expansion,” Bhargava said.
Kalaari Capital said the company has shown phenomenal five-fold growth in the last 12 months and with a stern focus on return on investment, it has left its competitors behind. CashKaro competes with cashback and affiliate companies such as CouponDunia, GrabOn, and GoPaisa.
Majority of the VC investments in the coupon and cashback startups happened in 2014-15 when e-commerce had just picked up in India. While a lot of such companies such as Priceburrp and DealsMagic have shut down, CashKaro is the biggest player in the industry. Times Internet acquired CouponDunia for an undisclosed amount in 2014 and GrabOn had raised a seed amount in the same year. In 2015, MySmartPrice had raised USD 1o million in Series B round led by Accel Partners.
Hudson Kyung-sik Ho, Managing Partner of KIP said, “India is a growing market for us and CashKaro is a great way for us to participate in the Indian e-Commerce industry. We believe this is a highly scalable opportunity and both Swati & Rohan have set it on a truly exciting growth trajectory. CashKaro & EarnKaro together have shown exceptional unit metrics and we are really excited to be a part of India’s affiliate story.”
