Magicpin, a hyperlocal discovery app, founded by Investor-turned-entrepreneurs Brij Bhushan and Anshoo Sharma have raised $3 million in Series A round of funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The app offers Instagram-like features where users can take pictures and selfies to avail of offers and discounts at neighbourhood stores.
“While looking at the market from an investing lens, it was quite clear that India is entering a phase where everyone would be connected through their smartphones. A trip to China in late 2014 was an eye opener for the kind of businesses and value such an environment would create. There is an opportunity window today in India for creating a massively valuable business that leverages data, technology and people networks around offline transactions, and we did not want to miss out on that,” said Sharma, co-founder and chief executive at Magicpin.
“The two key drivers of the investment are the quality of the founders and the large opportunity in the hyper-local space. The firm has extensive learnings and insights from its early investments in LivingSocial (US) and DianPing (China) that inform our view of the correct strategy in India,” said Bejul Somaia, managing director at Lightspeed Ventures.
Facts & Figures
- Gurgaon-based Magicpin is currently available in National Capital Region, Jaipur and Bengaluru.
- Magicpin listed 30,000 merchants on its platform and 150,000+ users doing 5,000 transactions a day.
- The company claims to drive close to $1 million worth of transactions for its merchants.
- Magicpin targets the age group of 16-32 years and sees 40% of its users come back on the mobile app every fortnight.
- It currently has over 100,000 downloads and is largely dominated by women users, according to Bhushan.
In Other Countries
In the US and China, similar business like Nextdoor, Foursquare and Meituan-Dianping, count on consumer data as an important source of revenues.
Magicpin is modelled around China’s Meituan-Dianping, which in January raised $3.3 billion at a valuation of $18 billion, according to a Techcrunch article. (Source)