Creator-Led Commerce Startup Wishlink Bags Funding To Help Brands Grow User Engagement

Creator-led commerce startup Wishlink has raised $3Mn in its seed funding round led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from angel investors and creators.

Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, ShareChat’s Ankush Sachdeva, Mamaearth’s Ghazal Alagh, Bombay Shaving Company’s Shantanu Deshpande, Treebo’s Rahul Chaudhary are some of the angel investors who participated in the round. In addition, creators such as Masoom Minawala and Biswa Kalyan Rath also joined the funding round.

Founded by Chandan Yadav, Shaurya Gupta and Divyansh Ameta, Wishlink works on enabling creators across social media platforms to drive commerce for brands via their personalised multi-brand storefronts. With its tech stack, it helps in customer acquisition and sales by driving creators’ audience from social media to brand websites.

Currently, Wishlink is working with brands such as H&M, Westside, Faballey, Indya, Aurelia, Wrogn, Libas, G.O.A.T Labs and ecommerce platforms including Amazon, Flipkart and AJIO. It has claimed to drive close to 2 Mn users to partner brands with a consistent 60% month-on-month growth in terms of users for the last three months.

 “We are strong believers in the power of creators to influence consumer behavior – they own attention and have massive distribution. Till now, their influence and distribution was limited to one-off paid collabs with brands with very limited tracking of results,” Shaurya Gupta, cofounder of Wishlink, said.

According to Gupta, the startup has built the infrastructure to enable creators picking up brands that they genuinely believe in, showcase them to their audience with full creative freedom and monetise their influence based on the sales and traffic they are able to drive to the brands’ websites.

“We are big believers in the potential of the creator economy to empower individual creators and influencers. However, unlocking this requires building platforms that target deep pools of revenue and therefore opportunities for them, like commerce,” Amit Aggarwal, principal of Elevation Capital, said. 

Creator-led commerce has emerged as one of the prominent ways for customer acquisition in the last couple of years. While the influencer-brand collaboration started initially with one-off social media posts, it has now taken the form of live commerce. Hence, many startups are now testing the waters in the creator-led commerce segment.

For example, InMobi Group’s Roposo also forayed last year in the live commerce segment with the launch of ‘creator-led, live entertainment commerce’. Even Amazon and Flipkart also have collaborated with creators to bank on live commerce. As per industry experts, the total size of the creator economy is estimated to be over $100 Mn in India.