Gurgaon-Based Local Business Discovery Startup Crown-It Raises $5.5 Mn in Series A Round

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Gurgaon-based Crown-it has raised a $5.5Mn in Series A round of funding from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners. The app is run by GoldVIP Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. and with this freshly infused capital the company is now planning to expand its service to more cities. It also plans to upgrade its technologies and increase the number of categories for retail.

It currently operates in Delhi-NCR and it plans to expand to over 25 cities in India and grow to 20Mn users within three years.

Sameer Grover, CEO and founder of the company said, “We help users discover and experience places which are relevant to them and around them, besides getting rewarded for visiting those merchants. For merchants, we give them measurable ROI marketing channel. We charge them on the business we actually give them.”

The company provides technology to local businesses to run marketing programs to attract consumers. The company charges the merchants a marketing fee for sales driven at the outlets and shares part of the fee with consumers as cashback offers. The app-only platform has listed local merchants in categories like florists, gift shops and even local kirana stores.

The app allows users to click photograph of the bill, upload it on the app as they visit on the listed outlet and redeem their cashback for shopping, phone bill payment or movie ticket. These offers can also be availed at a number of ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Jabong and BookMyShow.

The company was founded in March 2014 and claims to have a user base of 150,000 on its Android and iOS apps.

Other app-based players in the cash back, deals and discounts space in India are cashkaro.com, Hyderabad-based Shop Pirate, Pennyful.in and topcashback.in. and in local marketplace companies in this market includes Grofers, which recently raised $10 Mn in funding from Sequoia and Tiger Global and PepperTap which also raised $10Mn from SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital.