Gurgaon based Crown-it raises institutional fund of $ 5.5M

Gurgaon based Crown-it has raised institutional funding of $5.5 million from Accel Partners and Helion Venture Partners.
Crown-it, a marketplace for local businesses, which helps consumers discover local merchants and drive business to those merchants. Crown-it provides technology to local businesses to run marketing programs to attract consumers. It charges the merchants a marketing fee for sales driven at the outlets, and shares part of the fee with consumers as cashback.

GoldVIP Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns the product ‘Crown it’, was started in Mar-2014 with seed capital from Pallav Pandey. Sachin Arora had led two rounds of angel investment with GoldVIP, along with Sanjay Bakshi and Ravi Srivastava (of Purvi Ventures).

Sameer Grover, Founder and CEO, said, “Users love us because we help them discover and experience places which are relevant to them and around them, besides getting rewarded for visiting those merchants. Merchants give a fulfilling experience to our users and the interaction is frictionless. And we are a darling of merchants because we give them measurable ROI marketing channel. We charge them on the business we actually give them.”

With no current leader in the hyperlocal Online to Offline space (O2O), Crown-it is set on a course to become numero uno in the space. Crown-it is app only and, since its app launch in Aug-2014, has captured the imagination and allegiance of over 1.5 Lac consumers.

Crown-it is targeting F&B, Health & Wellness and Beauty, followed by long tail of local merchants in categories like florists, gift shops and even local kirana stores. Currently in restaurant category with around 5000 restaurants in Delhi where consumers get cash back, Crown-it is soon launching additional categories and multiple cities.

Crown-it currently has 150,000 user base on Android and iPhone and is operational in Delhi-NCR. It plans to grow to 20 Million user base in 3 years across 25 cities in India.

Sameer adds, “These are investors, who have been behind companies like MakeMyTrip, Flipkart, BookMyShow and Facebook. We are happy to be part of the family. We will be using these funds for expansion to newer cities, adding new retail categories, and upgrading our technology.”