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Local merchant discovery and privileges platform, Crownit, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from FreeCharge founders Kunal Shah & Sandeep Tandon, Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham and former Snapdeal CPO Anand Chandrasekaran.
Kunal Shah, Founder, FreeCharge, said, “Crownit has built a sustainable marketing programme for offline merchants. The consumer engagement of Crownit has proven that the product really works and has wide acceptance. At scale across 25 cities and 50K merchants it will work beautifully. Crownit is clearly turning into the Meituan of India.”
Founded in July 2014, by Sameer Grover and Ashish Munjal, Crownit is an app-only, hyperlocal merchant discovery and privileges platform. It is an O2O (Online to Offline) platform that allows local merchants to list themselves and attract consumers with deals and discounts.
The consumers discover merchants and get cashback for every transaction in the form of crowns. These crowns can be redeemed for movie vouchers, online shopping vouchers, talk-time recharge, bill payments and donations to charity etc.
It is active in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru. It has over 9,00,000 users and over 15,000 merchants listed on the platform. Crownit targets to have 20 million users and drive $1.2 Bn of annual GMV across 25 cities in India by 2019.
Initially focussed solely on food & beverages, beauty and fitness, Crownit has successfully expanded into travel category and soon plans to venture into retail, apparel, healthcare & entertainment.
Talking about the investment, Girish Mathrubootham, Founder, FreshDesk, said, “Crownit has razor sharp focus on customer satisfaction. A company at such early stage with so much passion on customer delight is something which awed me. And clearly the business model is disruptive and solving a big problem which local merchants face in India.”
Prior to this Crownit raised its Series-A funding of $5.5 Mn from Accel Partners and Helion Ventures in May 2015. Other players in the cash back, deals and discounts space in India are cashkaro.com, Shop Pirate, Pennyful.in and topcashback.in.
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