Exclusive: Wigzo Founder’s New Startup Nitro Bags Funds To Solve D2C Brands’ Customer Acquisition Challenges

Nitro Commerce, a full-stack revenue-as-a-service platform built for ecommerce and D2C brands and cofounded by Wigzo founder Umair Mohammed, has raised INR 15 Cr (about $1.8 Mn) in its seed funding round led by Cornerstone Venture Partners.

The funding round also saw participation from Warmup Ventures, Lead Angels, Dholakia Ventures, India Accelerator, and individual investors like Arjun Vaidya and Kunal Khattar.

The funding is part of INR 50 Cr (about $6 Mn) round that the startup is aiming to raise over the next few months.

Founded in 2023 by Umair Mohammed, Atyab Mohammed, Shamail Tayyab, and Pratik Anand, martech startup Nitro Commerce aims to provide technologies to new-age online brands to solve the customer acquisition bottleneck and help them increase revenue. 

The startup claims to be India’s first revenue-as-a-service stack for ecommerce, D2C, and other retail brands. Nitro Commerce currently has one live product, Nitro X, which it claims is a cookieless technology for future-proof marketing. This technology is awaiting the grant of a patent.

Nitro’s Grand Vision

Speaking to Inc42, Nitro Commerce cofounder and CEO Umair Mohammed said, “The ecommerce and D2C industry is accelerating at a phenomenal pace and a lot of new and older merchants are coming online. So we are building core technologies that will aid the top and middle of the funnel for these brands. We want to democratise this technology for merchants so that it is easy to access and deploy, and we are also building it as an outcome as a service.”

The startup claims to have already onboarded more than 140 D2C and ecommerce brands as clients, including Revlon, The Ayurveda Co. (T.A.C), and Amrutam, for Nitro X.

CEO Mohammed said that India being a Chrome-dominated market, Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies for Chrome users will impact online-first brands in the country as third-party cookies are the bedrock of advertising. 

“While third-party cookies collection has privacy hazards, the entire remarketing of brands was so far built on third-party cookies and remarketing generates almost 20% of revenue,” explained Mohammed. “So, this is where we found the first major problem to solve. Our technology does not compromise user privacy at all, yet it helps brands capture almost 20-30% more data into the funnel.”

Nitro Commerce expects to onboard over 1,000 brands on Nitro X by the end of FY25.

The funds will provide the startup a steady runway for the next few months until it turns profitable. It is eyeing profitability by the end of 2025.

Meanwhile, Nitro Commerce is also working on developing multiple other products. It plans to launch its next product Nitro AI in six to eight months to help ecommerce and D2C brands train large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies on their proprietary data.

Its other product Nitro Collab, which will provide brands with the ability to seamlessly collaborate with other brands and influencers, is currently under beta testing and is expected to be launched in Q4 FY25.

It also has two other products – Nitro Store and Nitro Play – in the pipeline.

Commenting on the investment,  Nanika Kakkar, partner at Cornerstone Venture, said Nitro Commerce unlocks value for brands through the end-to-end customer journey – from identity resolution and centralised data enrichment to building targeted behavioural marketing – leading to superlative customer conversions.

Meanwhile, D2C entrepreneur and investor Arjun Vaidya said, “I am a big advocate of the ecommerce revolution and believe one needs to invest in gold and the shovel. This (Nitro Commerce) is the shovel!”

The investors expect Nitro Commerce to become an integral part of the country’s burgeoning D2C market and ecommerce sector. As per Inc42, the country’s ecommerce industry is likely to become a $400 Bn market opportunity by 2030, clocking a CAGR of 19%. At about $300 Bn, the D2C sector is expected to account for 75% of this market.