Amazon Acquires India’s Reseller Startup GlowRoad

Synopsis: The company in its ongoing competition with Reliance's JioMart, Tata-owned BigBasket, and Walmart-owned Flipkart has already invested over $6.5 billion in the Indian market. 

On Friday one of the biggest tech giants Amazon acquired a complete women-focused social commerce startup GlowRoad but the company did not disclose the total amount in which they did the deal. Amazon is trying to enter into a buzzy segment of the market where a large number of new players have emerged in past few years. Backed by Vertex Ventures, venture capital fund Accel, and a few others, Glowroad has been valued at around $75 million.

In a statement, the company also said that this acquisition will help Amazon to meet its commitment to handling 10 million local Indian businesses by the end of the year 2025. One of the Amazon’s spokesperson also said, 

Amazon continues to explore new ways to digitize India and delight customers, micro-entrepreneurs, and sellers, and bringing GlowRoad onboard is a key step in this direction, Together with GlowRoad, Amazon will help accelerate entrepreneurship among millions of creators, homemakers, students, and small sellers from across the country.

Apart from this, the company in its ongoing competition with Reliance’s JioMart, Tata-owned BigBasket, and Walmart-owned Flipkart has already invested over $6.5 billion in the Indian market. Hence, Amazon acquiring GlowRoad might help it to compete with Shopsy owned by Flipkart, and a few other startups and firms including DealShare, Mall91, SoftBank-backed Meesho, BulBul, simsim, etc. Also regarding the same, one of Amazon’s spokesperson said, 

This acquisition will complement GlowRoad’s already loved service with Amazon’s technology, infrastructure, and digital payments capabilities, bringing more efficiency and cost-saving for everyone.

Started in the year 2017, GlowRoad was founded by Nilesh Padariya, Dr. Sonal Verma, Nitesh Pant, Shekhar Sahu, and Kunal Sinha. GlowRoad is a social e-commerce platform, which allows customers to buy products at a wholesale price along with helping them to resell the same on Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook. This does not end here as the company also helps their customers to get their orders delivered and collect cash on their behalf. 

The company is backed by various investors including CDH China, Accel Partners, Korea Investment Partners, and Vertex, and helped them to build a network of around 6 million resellers. This complete network has 20,000 suppliers, 18 million buyers, and 2,000 cities. GlowRoad is liked very much by people as it also provides its users with access to virtual shops, and a large number of products from suppliers, providing better payments and shipping facilities to their customers thus removing the problems of starting their own online business.