Sequoia’s Surge-Backed Video Ecommerce Startup Is Raising $14.7 Mn Funding Round

One of the graduates of Sequoia’s early-stage accelerator programme Surge, live commerce startup BulBul is raising an INR 105 Cr ($14.7 Mn) funding round.

In a blog post, BulBul app founder and CEO Sachin Bhatia said that the company “looks forward to welcoming one of India’s most revered entrepreneur and his fund to this elite group, as part of our current INR 105 Cr funding round.”

Bhatia also mentioned that Leo Capital (Rajul Garg), Surge (Shailendra, Prateek & the entire Surge Team), Sequoia India (Mohit and Shraeyansh), CDH (Damien Zhang) are company’s advisors and investors.

Founded in 2018 by Sachin Bhatia, Atit Jain and Sichen (Sianna) Liu, BulBul is a vernacular live streaming ecommerce platform. The company enables hosts, sellers and consumers to use Bulbul as a platform to create videos, go live, sell products and services and for consumers to consume content and make informed purchase decisions.

Bhatia said that the company launched the product in March 2019 and have scaled the business exceedingly fast.

He said that the company has already recorded GMV worth INR.15 Cr, serviced over 280K customers and 400K transactions, with very high gross margins.

“Consumers have consumed 10M minutes of content with over 15Mn video views, 1.4Mn likes, 6Mn shares and a 1Mn comments,” Bhatia wrote.

The company has built a team in Gurugram, Bengaluru and Yiwu (China). “Forty percent of our team is now women, in addition to the 100s of female hosts across the country who create and distribute product videos for us. Over time we see these hosts becoming key drivers of our business with the potential to generate substantial income for themselves,” Bhatia added.

With more than 500 Mn Indians relying on the Internet for their day-to-day life, shopping online has become an inherent choice. Interestingly, according to Statista, over 2.14 Bn people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online by 2021.

After the leading ecommerce marketplaces, investor and market interest has moved towards B2B and social commerce as players scale their ecommerce businesses with niche plans and focus. As a model of video to sell products online, BulBul has increased curiosity across the markets and will be an interesting model to further explore.