In one of the largest seed funding rounds in India, 10club has raised $40 million to ramp up its e-commerce roll-up business. The funding round was led by Fireside Ventures and a US investor, who is active in the roll-up sector. Heyday, PDS International, Class 5 Global and Secocha Ventures, boAt founders Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta along with several other global investors participated in the round.

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The fund raise comes at a time when many startups have gone through funding rounds claiming to model themselves on the successful U.S.-based Thrasio - the world’s leading acquirer of private label businesses on Amazon.

Pitching a similar model, Global Bees by Firstcry has raised nearly $80 million with SoftBank as one of the investors. Mensa Brands, led by Medlife founder Ananth Narayanan recently secured $50 million. Now, 10club has joined the growing list of India’s Thrasio-inspired companies.

Fireside Ventures, which has invested in boAt, Mamaearth and Bombay Shaving Company, believes India’s online-first brands are at the cusp of the next revolution. “Together with the team at 10club, we will be able to drive this change and enable e-commerce entrepreneurs to realize the full potential of their brands,” said Vinay Singh, Partner, Fireside Ventures, who is now set to join 10club's board of directors.

Founded in 2020 by Bhavna Suresh, Joel Ayala and Deepak Nair, 10club wants to acquire promising-but-plateauing businesses on e-commerce platforms and ‘roll them up’ to gain scale.

Over the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic, several entrepreneurs have built successful businesses by leveraging the e-commerce boom in India. However some of these early-stage brands fail to scale beyond a revenue threshold. More so, increased competition and limited access to funding opportunities leads to a stagnation of growth.

10club aims to acquire such businesses and infuse funds, technology, supply chain and marketing expertise. The company says it can scale up such businesses by 10 times. Hence, the name 10club.

“This funding will enable us to expand our portfolio and bring about transformational changes for the businesses we acquire,” said Bhavna Suresh, Co-founder & CEO, 10club.

So far, the company has engaged with 300 entrepreneurs across product categories and signed Letters Of Intent (LOI) worth $15 million with plans to start operating such businesses under its portfolio in the coming weeks.

(Edited by : Jerome Anthony)