Social commerce startup Simsim secures $16M

Simsim, a seven-month-old social commerce startup in India has recently raised a total of $16 million in Series A and Series B funding rounds. The startup seeks to recreate the offline retail experience with the help from influencers.

The Gurgaon-based budding startup has raised the funds from Accel Partners, Shunwei Capital, and Good Capital.  The recently held Series B funding round had a fund collection worth $8 million.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, co-founder of Simsim, Amit Bagaria said: “Despite e-commerce players bandying out major discounts, most of the sales in India are still happening in brick-and-mortar stores. There is a simple reason for that: Trust.”

Simsim claims to have created an e-commerce platform that largely plays the same role as any other platform that is already in place but takes a different path with product descriptions.

On realizing the fact that the majority of Indians are not comfortable with product descriptions written in English, Simsim tried to bring in a change in this area by catering to the needs of people in different local languages.

The e-commerce platform is filled with many short videos created by influencers in different local languages for its users. The videos will have influencers talking about a certain product they apply and also explain the ins-and-outs of the products.

At present, the platform supports languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and English but will add more languages by the end of the year.