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Sustainability consulting and VC firm CoCreate Ventures, that helps companies to pivot, has invested an undisclosed amount in an omnichannel book renting platform, JustBooks.
JustBooks plans to deploy the raised funds towards revamping its digital presence, developing its technology for better customer management and loyalty programmes, and bringing more human resources to manage the brand and introduce new categories in books.
Commenting on the investment, Suresh Narasimha, Partner, CoCreate Ventures said, “JustBooks was an ideal platform for us to demonstrate how we can help entrepreneurs to adapt to disruption. With JustBooks we are confident that we would unlock huge potential in the knowledge space that exists in India. We are happy that we are helping entrepreneurs when no others are and in a way no others can.”
Co-founded by TeliBrahma founder Suresh Narasimha and former partner at Ojas Ventures Pavan Krishnamurthy, CoCreate Ventures’ maiden investment in a library chain JustBooks aims to help the company towards revamping its digital presence.
As per the terms of the deal, the newly-formed company, JustBooks Solutions Pvt Ltd has acquired the business and brand JustBooks from Strata Technology Services through an asset sale. As per an official statement, Strata was running the omnichannel book renting service with over 1 Mn books and with a presence across 13 cities. CoCreate Ventures assisted JustBooks Solutions in the acquisition.
Talking about the funding, Sridhar Rajaram, CEO, JustBoooks said, “With over a million books in our omnichannel network and immense consumer loyalty, we are now looking to scale in terms of new channels and products to enhance this experience. We believe that we need to step up as we grow and create an interesting knowledge platform that adds huge economic value to all the stakeholders in the days to come.”
Earlier in August 2016, Amazon India launched a ‘Used Books’ store category. The online store claims to have over 1,00,000 offers across genres such as literature, romance, biography, and textbooks.
Other major online portals for used books in the market are Pen and Parchment (P&P), a virtual bookstore that was launched earlier this year, Bibliofreaks, a Hyderabad-based online second-hand book store launched in 2013, Noida-based Second Hand Books India and SellBuyBook that was launched in 2015 by four former IIIT Delhi students.
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