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Gurugram-based SaaS mobile application platform BeatRoute Innovations has raised its Pre-Series A round of funding from Quarizon Consultancy Services LLP. The round was closed last week.
The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
The primary purpose of this investment was to get out of bootstrapped stage and enhance the equity of the platform by involving the first set of investors. The team further plans to raise a Series A in about nine months.
The investment will also be utilised to operationalise product capability to solve the problem of wasted trade promotions. As stated by a company spokesperson, “It’s like a subsidy in this industry. You allocate 100 INR to promoting the sales of your product to push it to the retail shelf, however only half of that reaches the intended target. We have vowed to change that for established as well as growing brands.”
BeatRoute was founded by Vinay Singh in January 2014. It facilitates last-mile retail between consumer packaged goods companies, distributors, and kirana (neighbourhood) stores in India. It is associated with brands like PepsiCo, Danone, Cremica, Valvoline, Unicharm and more. The startup’s technology algorithms help these companies bring visibility to last-mile transactions and help customers ascertain the exact nature of retail landscape profiles to achieve market coverage that has not been possible so far.
The unorganised retail trade market is estimated to be about $500 Bn in India. According to an official statement, “Our focus is to enable the ecosystem rather than disrupting it. Brands who subscribe to our platform, on board their sales teams, retailers, and distributors on it. As of now, brands pay us for delivering market coverage. They like how our algorithms make it possible for them to ascertain the exact scope and nature of their retail landscape and run differentiated promotions.”
With 30 paying customers in India and several more from overseas, the company claims to have been operationally profitable since April 2016.
Earlier in April 2016, Connecto, a Noida based SaaS startup was acquired in a cash and stock deal by GirnarSoft, the parent company of online auto portals CarDekho.com, Gaadi.com and Zigwheels.com. Other players in the sector are SignEasy, Table Grabber, WebEngage, Freshdesk, Wingify and Helpshift.
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