FirstCry’s GlobalBees Acquires Sustainable Home Care Brand The Better Home

FirstCry’s GlobalBees, a Thrasio-style venture, has acquired sustainable home care products company The Better Home. This is the company’s first acquisition. 

Prior to this acquisition, the company had raised $150 Mn in a mix of equity and debt in a Series A led by the parent company FirstCry and some of the ecommerce unicorn’s investors. Besides this, Lightspeed Venture Partners has also invested in GlobalBees in what is one of the largest Series A funding rounds in the Indian startup history.

Post the acquisition, the 15 member core team that built The Better Home will join GlobalBees and continue working towards the company’s initial goal. The Better Home products have so far been selling on Amazon and the company’s website.

The Better Home was launched by its parent company The Better India in 2020 by Dhimant Parekh, and is a D2C range of sustainable home-cleaners. The company claims to have made deliveries across 600+ cities and towns in India and reached over 70,000 customers in its first year of operations.

Founded by Nitin Agarwal and Supam Maheshwari, GlobalBees invests in and acquires seller businesses on Amazon India, Flipkart and other ecommerce marketplaces. It is one of the early adopters of the Thrasio-like model in India. 

Speaking on the acquisition, Dhimant Parekh, founder of The Better India and The Better Home commented “Our vision at TBI is to leverage our massive community of over 200 Mn readers to build meaningful, impact-focused, scalable and ‘better’ businesses.”

“The Better Home will continue to further its mission in the world, and make every household’s carbon footprint a little lesser with this association,” he further added.

Massachusetts-based startup Thrasio was founded in 2018 and is valued close to $4 Bn. The ecommerce company’s model revolves around acquiring third-party sellers on Amazon in the US and helping them to scale further.

GlobalBees is looking at a similar model and is looking to acquire 30-40 D2C brands across categories, Maheshwari told the audience at The D2C Summit by Inc42 Plus. 

An Inc42 Plus report, titled, Indian Tech Startup Funding Report Q1 2021, shows that D2C and vertical ecommerce startups are fuelling investor confidence in the ecommerce ecosystem. More importantly, between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, the funding amount for D2C startups had registered a 93% average quarterly growth.

India is currently seeing a rise of smaller brands, with around 850K vendors selling on Amazon India. Of these, around 4,152 crossed INR  1 Cr in sales in 2020, according to Amazon. There are around 350K such sellers on Flipkart, of which 70 crossed INR 1 Cr in sales. This is the reason behind the recent rise of Indian Thrasio styles startups. Other examples of such startups include Evenflow, and 10club. 

New York-based investment firm Tiger Global has also reportedly backed a similar venture headed by Flipkart veteran Rishi Vasudev. Vasudev’s latest fashion and retail venture named GOAT Brands Labs, will acquire lifestyle brands and help them build as well as grow online.