D2C eCommerce Platform GlobalBees Notches $150M Series A

India’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) investment platform GlobalBees raised $150 million in a Series A funding round led by FirstCry, with additional participation by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Economic Times reported on Monday (July 19).

The round is $75 million in equity and $75 million in debt and is said to be the largest Series A funding in India. The startup was launched this year and is similar to Boston-headquartered Thrasio, a company that made a business out of acquiring third-party Amazon sellers.

Headquartered in Bengali, the startup buys and teams with digitally native brands in numerous verticals and has a revenue rate of  $1 million to $20 million.

“GlobalBees looks to partner with digitally native brands across categories such as beauty, personal care, home, kitchen, food, nutrition, sports, lifestyle, etc. with a revenue rate of $1 million to $20 million,” the company said in a statement, per the news outlet.

The deal also includes the appointment of new GlobalBees board members — Vikas Agnihotri of SoftBank, Harsha Kumar of Lightspeed, Atul Gupta of Premji Invest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures and Kshitij Sheth of Chrys Capital.

“Apart from capital, GlobalBees brings in strategic capabilities across marketing and growth, technology, distribution, sourcing, branding, warehousing, logistics, R&D, product and operations — all things essential to rapidly scale brands in the digital space,” GlobalBees CEO Nitin Agarwal, who co-founded the company with FirstCry Co-Founder Supam Maheshwari.

Agarwal added that GlobalBees is looking to develop a digital distribution and enterprise ecosystem, but all brands it partners with won’t be acquired on the first day, TechCrunch reported. Instead, new partnerships will turn into acquisitions across a three-year period. 

Thrasio raised $260 million in a Series C round at a $1 billion valuation led by Advent International. The startup has been profitable since it was founded three years ago and on average, doubled its revenue every 73 days. It is one of the top sellers on Amazon and supports more than 6,000 products.