Entrepreneur couple Meena, K Ganesh lead Marquee Investors in Series A investment in Overcart

Overcart, an online marketplace, which sells excess stock and seal-opened products, has closed Series A investment led by K Ganesh's entrepreneurship platform GrowthStory.in with follow-on investment from GSF Superangels. This move reinforces the growth of the e-commerce ecosystem in the country.

Overcart, whose business model is a cross between Overstock.com in the US and Alibaba in China, helps businesses and large e-commerce companies manage their customer returns and liquidate their unsold stock directly to end-consumers and smaller retailers. This gives consumers access to products at liquidation prices while giving businesses better value for their stock and reducing their warehousing costs.

K Ganesh, who exited Tutorvista to Pearson in a $213 million deal and set up Portea Medical, India's largest home healthcare company, moves into the e-commerce derivative space after successful investments in traditional e-commerce models such as BlueStone and BigBasket. "With e-commerce growing at a fast pace in India, the ecosystem around e-commerce companies has reached an interesting scale. We are investing in Overcart, as they are solving a massive pain point for e-commerce companies - returns and unused stock," said K Ganesh.

"With the marquee investors we now have on board, Overcart is ideally positioned to scale in step with India's e-commerce sector. The consolidation we are seeing in the e-commerce industry fits right into our business model," said Co-founder Alex Souter, pointing out that funding will be used to scale Overcart's business - on the supply chain side - as well as building its talent and technology. K Ganesh will join the board of directors and Jonathan Bill (also an investor) comes on board as a strategic advisor. GSF Superangels, the accelerator founded by Rajesh Sawhney, is also following on with its investment in Overcart. Dinesh Agarwal (IndiaMart Founder and CEO), Aloke Bajpai (iXigo Founder and CEO), Rajesh Sawhney (GSF, Founder), Rishab Malik (GSF, Operating Partner), and Tara Bhargava (GSF, EIR) have also joined in this round.

Overcart targets the consumer electronics market in India with their largest category, smartphones, which is growing at an incredible rate. According to IDC research, India is currently the third largest smartphone market across the world globally - sales of smartphones grew nearly threefold in 2013 to 44 million units - and this is estimated to reach 156 million units by 2017. 

"Our long-term vision is to completely replace the returns department of e-commerce and retail companies," says Co-founder Saptarshi Nath. "We think of ourselves as a service provider, not a retailer. We fundamentally believe that a light tech-and-data based business can help companies find the best liquidation channels while ensuring consumers have access to high-quality products at drop-dead prices."

Although a purely online business, Overcart is different from traditional e-commerce companies as they reach both online and offline consumers. Online consumers can buy products directly through Overcart.com, while Overcart reaches offline consumers by supplying retailers directly through their large network and auction features.