Radhika Agrawal and her husband Sandeep Agrawal along with SanjaySeth started Shopclues in 2011 keeping the middle class families of India as their target instead of upmarket mall goers. Shopclues which like to be called the masses online market place, announced fresh round of funding of US$1.1 billion, marked another shift in India’s booming startup industry and with this new valuation Radhika Agrawal became the first big shot female co-founder to break into Unicorn Club. To Radhika Agrawal, it is more about passion than being the only woman in all men’s club. To Radhika it not a big deal and there are more important challenges for her to focus on like making Shopclues more profitable and as chief business officer, she has a arduous task ahead. Radhika says that she is confident that their execution and capital efficiency will make them never ask for fund rise in future. They expect to be profitable with IPO in 2017 even before India’s largest ecommerce players Flipkart is expected to go public.
Shopclues counts on TigerGlobal, GIC which is Singapore’s largest wealth fund and Nexus Venture Partners to be the investors. While Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon, the Industry’s bigwigs make big piece of their sales from electronic goods and mobile phones, Snapdeals sells bedsheets and towels. Home furnishings are Shopclues biggest sale drivers. According to Radhika, the way to pull common man online is to make it look like a local market. In four years Shopclues has approximately 350,000 medium and small sellers and 14 million registered users on their platform.
India, being a traditional mindset is often natural barrier for woman in the country to make a progress as the result of which there is no Elizabeth Holmes in the country. The business scene is changing and that change is what Radhika would have India focused on.
