Kalaari Capital Backs Ecommerce Enabler Swift

Internet commerce enabler Swift has raised $2.2M in Pre-Series A funding led by Kalaari Capital with participation from existing investors FirstCheque, Indian Angel Network and other angel investors.

The funds from this round will be used to scale engineering efforts and simplify business workflows across checkout, payments and fulfillment.

Founded in 2019 by BITS Pilani  alumni Shyam Kalita, Prayas Mittal and Debanshu Sinha, Swift’s commerce platform helps SMEs, D2C and omnichannel brands run their internet commerce ventures and in the process simplifies the ecommerce experience for the consumers too.

“The internet commerce infrastructure in India has been built to serve large marketplaces making it impossible for smaller brands to compete with them. This is clearly visible in the small proportion of online orders placed via D2C store fronts vis-a-vis marketplaces” said Shyam Kalita, cofounder at Swift. Shyam firmly believes that ‘this disparity comes from problems rooted in code and not business’. “Our checkout product helps brands interact seamlessly with customers by providing a unified one-tap layer for marketing, cart management and payments. Swift’s flagship fulfillment product on the other hand, helps sellers manage, process and deliver better. Put together, our platform can power the growth of India’s internet economy,” he added.

Swift’s internet commerce stack is designed to serve D2C brands, drop shippers, small businesses and Omnichannel brands equally well. The recently launched ‘Swift Checkout’ product helps sellers increase order volume by reducing cart abandonments, while their ‘Fulfill with Swift’ product combines OMS, WMS, Shipping and Reconciliation all in one place.

Prayas Mittal, cofounder, Swift, said, “Competing with marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart, without the infrastructure to enable commerce is akin to running a mule in a horses’ race. At Swift we have built a one-stop solution that enables sellers to focus on their core business while our infrastructure manages everything around it – cart conversions, payments, fulfilment and returns reconciliation. There is no doubt that the next decade of eCommerce in India belongs to D2C brands and Swift looks to power that transformation.”

 Speaking on the D2C sector, Kiran Vasireddy, partner, Kalaari Capital, added, “The D2C ecosystem and vertical ecommerce in India has been growing rapidly in the last few years. We believe building solutions that cater to online brands and SMEs, which will help them to compete with large horizontal e-commerce players, will be a large opportunity going forward.”

According to an analysis by Inc42 Plus, Indian D2C brands have raised more than $2.04 Bn in funding since 2014. More importantly, this segment is one of the biggest contributors to the ecommerce industry’s revival and growth in the past year.

Additionally, as per data till March 20, 2021, Indian startups raised $2.7 Bn from 268 funding deals. Ecommerce was the top-funded sector at $520 Mn and ranked third in terms of deal count with 33 deals. The share of ecommerce to the total funding for Indian startups also rose from 9% in Q4 of FY2020 to 18.9% in April,2021.

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