New Delhi-based Snapdeal.com, India’s largest shopping website, has acquired the assets of Shopo.in, an online marketplace for Indian designer and handcrafted products not unlike Etsy.
Shopo.in had raised seed funding in 2011 – backers include Sequoia Capital, SRI Capital, Seeders, Sashi Reddi, and other angel investors.
We are delighted to announce that Shopo.in is now a part of Snapdeal, India’s largest Marketplace.
— Shopo (@shopoindia) May 31, 2013
In the past two years, Shopo.in is said to have built a wide assortment of handcrafted products across a bunch of categories such as apparel, accessories, home décor and others.
It is far from the only Indian ‘answer to Etsy’, we should point out, as Shopo.in faced competition from the likes of CraftsVilla.com, UnwrapIndia, Aniika, Nethaat, and a plethora of others.
Earlier this year, one of Shopo.in’s co-founders, Krithika Nelson, stepped down from her position as CEO.
This was seemingly due to health reasons, although sources at the time indicated to NextBigWhat that the online marketplace (and many of its peers) weren’t exactly performing well.
Speaking about this acquisition, Snapdeal.com co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl said:
“The Indian designer and handicrafts market is large but highly fragmented and the demand for such products is tremendous. Snapdeal’s mission is to provide a platform for small businesses across India to be able to sell to consumers nationally.
The team at Shopo has built a very strong supply side for niche Indian handicraft and designer products.
With this acquisition, we will now provide these unique products at great prices to Snapdeal’s 20 million members, and warmly welcome Shopo’s sellers to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach.”
Snapdeal has raised more than $50 million in venture capital to date. However, reports surfaced last April that said eBay participated in a huge funding round for the company that brought total capital raised by Snapdeal to over $100 million, though this was never confirmed to date.
Financial terms of the Shopo.in deal were not disclosed.
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