Buyhatke raises USD 1M from Kris Gopalkrishnan, Japanese e-commerce and investment company BEENOS

Buyhatke, one of the leading price discovery companies in India, has raised a million dollar funding round to expand its operations and work on interesting products in the price discovery domain from noted investors.

The journey so far

Buyhatke was started by Gaurav Dahake, Prashant Singh and Srikanth Sethumadhavan when they were final year students at IIT Kharagpur to counter the problem of getting the best price for any product sold online. They now have a catalogue with over 30 million products from over 300 websites in India, while they were covering around 50 websites back in 2013.

The shopping add-on aims to give an all-round shopping experience with price comparison, price trends telling users the best time to buy, price drop alerts and coupons at checkout. Their extension has drawn good traction and is the highest rated shopping extension globally.

Srikanth Sethumadhavan, chief design lead at buyhatke stated:

We are working on creating the best shopping research experience for the users and would love to touch every aspect of decision making that happens while making a shopping purchase decision. We plan to impact 10 million users monthly to have the ultimate shopping experience by this year's end.

Mobile vs web debate

Buyhatke serves over 10 million product searches via its different platforms of extension, web and mobile. Gaurav revealed that right now approximately 60% of their traffic is from their extension and website, while the remaining 40% is from their mobile app. They also have a strong mobile presence with apps across Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

While some e-commerce portals have closed down their mobile websites and are planning to close their desktop websites as well to go mobile app only, Gaurav feels that their strategy is not right:

Restricting user access and choice for anything is bad. Over 70% of Facebook's revenue came from mobile ads, but they aren't shutting their website, even Google who acquired Android, are not going to shut down their website. Companies need to have both mobile and web presence to make product and content discovery easier for consumers.

Funding and future plans

Buyhatke has raised investment from noted investors like Kris Gopalkrishnan, Japanese e-commerce and investment company BEENOS which has investments in multiple emerging markets in this domain.

Teruhide Sato, Founder of BEENOS, said:

We see a very interesting dynamic unfolding in the Indian e-commerce industry and comparison shopping aggregators with their unique capabilities can help consumers find the best bang on the buck. We loved the unique innovations that the buyhatke team had worked on and had achieved good traction. We see BEENOS can effectively leverage our partner network access from investments in multiple emerging countries in the domain to help Buyhatke.

Kris Gopalakrishnan mentioned that he sees a very young and energetic team at Buyhatke which has built a great product and has the capability to deliver world class shopping research experience to value conscious Indian consumers.

Buyhatke plans to use this funding round to further enhance its service offerings by improving their mobile app, expanding their team and also developing a new product (which they weren't willing to talk about at this stage). The team currently comprises of 15 members from institutes such as IIT and BITS who have varied experience across Directi, Amazon, Flipkart, Samsung, ITC and they plan to triple the count by this year’s end.

Prashant, the Co-founder and CTO also added:

There are interesting data possibilities that arise with the immense data information that buyhatke has across shopping. The team is exploring great partnership opportunities with the leading consumer internet companies for this vast trove of data.

Website: buyhatke