Retail tech firm Arzooo raises $70 mn in Series B led by Japan's SBI group

Existing investors Celesta Capital and 3 Lines VC also participated in this round, along with Trifecta Leaders Fund and Tony Xu, the Founder of Doordash

Retail technology platform Arzooo, has raised $70 million in Series B round of funding led by SBI Investment, arm of Japan’s SBI Group and Trifecta Leaders Fund. Tony Xu, the Founder of Doordash has also invested in the current round, making Arzooo his first India investment.

Existing investors including Celesta Capital and 3 Lines VC also participated in the round. The Company had previously raised a Series A from Celesta and 3 lines, followed by an investment from Zoom founder Eric Yuan. Arzooo has raised a total of $85 million so far.

The firm will use the latest funding to scale its tech platform, which is focused on boosting growth at stores. The mone will also help expand the platform's market reach as Arzooo continues to deepen its vertical play in the $65 billion consumer electronics segment in India.

Khushnud Khan, Co-founder & CEO, Arzooo, said the round was oversubscribed by 1.4x.

Founded by ex-Flipkart executives Khan and Rishi Rathore, Arzooo’s platform provides retailers access to a wide variety of SKUs across leading and emerging brands. The firm has a pan-India presence and is already powering over 30,000 retailers, allowing them to scale without holding extensive inventory, while providing them access to pricing.

Khushnud added, “While the last decade has been about the proliferation of new-age economies, the Internet was still seen as a rival to offline retail...Today, technology is making inroads into brick & mortar and we are excited to be at the forefront of this revolution while catalysing it by enabling the next generation retail for lacs of neighborhood stores. Arzooo is essentially eliminating the barrier of size, scale and capital for medium and small stores while democratizing retail in India.”

Yoshitaka Kitao, Chairman and president, SBI investment, said, “Arzooo’s business model is very capital efficient and can meet the increasingly diversified requirement of both retail shops and end customers. It is also great for them to have built a self-branded functional logistics system, which is one of the most important parts of the business.”

“This is large category of consumption, ripe for disruption through the efforts of companies like Arzooo, especially in non-metro markets. Rishi, Khushnud and the team have built this scalable platform in a very capital efficient manner, and continue to add new use cases empowering retailers to address this rapidly growing market.” said Lavanya Ashok, Partner at Trifecta Capital.

DC advisory worked with Arzooo as advisor on managing the transaction process for this round.