eCommerce Platform Near.Store Raises $300,000 Seed Fund

When you think about purchasing monthly groceries, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? That I will purchase the same from a nearby grocery store.

Good enough! That’s the mentality most of us carry. But have you ever thought that even when you are purchasing from one particular shop for several years, what extra benefit did you get? Let’s leave the benefits aside and talk about do we even know about the competitor brands, what prices they are offering or what quality they are offering apart from the brands that our regular grocery seller has. No! Right?

When the entire economy has been digitalized, there is a transformation that is much needed for our nearby grocery stores as well. This visionary idea has laid a foundation for an eCommerce platform based in Bengaluru i.e. Near.Store which has successfully raised a seed funding of $300,000.

Ashish Kumar, founder of Near.Store said, “There is a huge potential for the right product, one that doesn’t need a change in behavior at the store. India has over 12 million kirana (corner) stores, which contribute to over 90% of the consumer goods sales, dwarfing both modern retail and online that together.”

Near.Store, is a plug & play based ecommerce platform for the offline stores and has raised a huge seed funding of $300,000 from Sauce.vc, an early stage consumer focused VC fund and also the other individual investors.

Near.Store will enable local stores to digitize their entire inventory online and develop new consumer base & relationships along with the access to business data and insights to make their business more effective and efficient.

The Near.Store is based on a unique platform wherein the only effort required from the store owner is to plug the Near.Store dongle device into their billing machines or mobile phone and the patent-pending platform i.e. Near.Store will automatically get the inventory online immediately. Once plugged in, the AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) algorithms, which are inbuilt in the platform take over and manage the various aspects of discovery (SEO), and hyper-local promotion of the store website.

“Most existing solutions are dependent on the mobile phone based apps, which make the process of going online very difficult and time consuming. In most scenarios, such products get abandoned by store-owners because of the cumbersome nature of their cataloging experience,” said the founder of Near.Store.

With the Headquarters based in Mumbai, Near.Store is led by an experienced team of three digital entrepreneurs who have unbeatable experience in the field of digital marketing, digital transformation and fin-tech. The Near.Store team has also been supported and appreciated by Shripad Nadkarni, ex-marketing head of Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson, founder of Maverix Food Platforms and co-creator of the Paperboat and Epigamia Brands.

Mr. Manu Chandra, Founder of Sauce.vc said that “The Near.Store team has a deep and intrinsic understanding and knowledge of the Indian digital space and has a proven track record of creating and running successful companies and businesses. Local grocery/kirana stores are the mainstay of India’s CPG landscape and getting them digitalized in a zero effort manner holds a great potential for the entire retail ecosystem to help grow and expand the entire economy at a rapid pace.”