Snapdeal Elevates $500 Million From Alibaba,Foxconn & Softbank

E-commerce firm Snapdeal has reportedly raised $500 million (roughly Rs. 3,197 crores) from Chinese hardware manufacturer Foxconn and e-commerce giant Alibaba along with existing investor SoftBank, according to a news report published Sunday.

The Re/code report cites multiple people familiar with the matter. Snapdeal has so far raised over $1.1 billion in eight funding rounds so far, its last investment round in October 2014 was a reported $627 million (roughly Rs. 4,009 crores) led by Japanese telecom and media group SoftBank Corp. Other investors in Snapdeal include Bessemer Venture Partners, Ratan N Tata, Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and eBay.

A news report in June had covered the rumours of a potential investment in Snapdeal, where the two Chinese companies were planning to invest together for a 10 percent stake that would value the company at  roughly $5 billion (roughly Rs. 32,100 crores).

Foxconn CEO Terry Gou had shared the company’s ambitions in July to set up 10-12 manufacturing facilities in India by 2020, outlining a strategy of partnerships covering areas beyond hardware – content, cloud, and bandwidth based services. For Alibaba, this would be their first major investment since Paytm, where it took a 25 percent stake in the company for $500 million dollars. We’ve reached out to Snapdeal for a comment.

Founded in 2010, Snapdeal started out as a daily deals platform, and has since diversified into a full fledged e-commerce player, with a team of over a thousand employees. The service covers an assortment of over 12 million products from 150,000 sellers across over 500 categories,, and covers over 5,000+ cities and towns in India. Snapdeal’s high-profile acquisitions include FreeCharge, Shopo, eSportsBuy, Grabbon, Doozton, Smartprix, Exclusively.in, UniCommerce, RupeePower and LetsGoMo.

Snapdeal rolled out a new design for its mobile apps and website in July, and relaunched Shopo as an app-only, zero-commission marketplace. Most recently, it entered the hyperlocal delivery space with ‘Snapdeal Instant’, which would fulfil deliveries in three Indian cities as early as an hour.