[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nyone coming from one of the smaller towns of India will surely agree to the significant role the small local shops play in the lives of the people. Whether it is groceries, electronics, medicine, or clothes, the locals rely heavily on them.
Deepak Ravindran, who hails from Thrissur town in Kerala, saw nothing different. The small size of the local shops and limited stock of products have created problems for his family too like many other in the country.
“This is a problem not just in small towns, but even a tech-savvy city like Bangalore. Though people may have gotten used to shopping in malls or eCommerce sites, they still run to the local drugstore for stomach flu pills or the BP medication that they run out of.”
In a bid to improve the scenario of consumers haplessly dependent on the local stores, Ravindran came up with Lookup. It is conversational commerce app which recommends stores and targeted products according to users’ personal style, enabling them to shop from anywhere nearby and getting products delivered within 60 minutes.
“Our goal was to eliminate the need for calls to get things done. We envision Lookup to become Google for the offline world,” said he.
It began when Ravindran once saw his mother using Whatsapp to communicate with a store to buy groceries.
“This is when I thought of a solution – What if one sends a message sent before he/she set out to a shop to find if the pharmacy pill is in stock? Or if one can take a picture of the doctor’s prescription in the phone and send it to a nearby shop and communicate with them without sharing any confidential data like your phone number? Things would be much easier,” says Ravindran.
India has over 40 million small urban businesses with less than 10 employees each. These include everything from coffee shops and groceries to small restaurants.
He said, “The traditional organized retail never really made it big here. Our bet is, mobile commerce will leapfrog it and work with mom and pop stores. About 95% of these small merchant businesses (SMBs) do not have a good digital presence. The future would be to bring all the SMB’s online and enable them to do commerce over chat, which we believe is the simplest platform that everyone understands.”
Against the huge discounts that the major e-commerce ventures offer, the local retailers have no way to step up without resorting to better technology.
“Lookup serves like Google does but for finding products and services in one’s vicinity and getting it delivered on demand. Our quirky marketing helps us to stand out. Our extensive use of emoticons and GIFs is in line with our strategy to put out material that has universal appeal and that people can instantly relate to.”
Lookup is currently present in 4 cities- Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi & Pune. It has already crossed around 1.5 million user downloads and 90,000 registered vendors. “We earn from the order commission wherein we receive a share of the revenue gained through orders generated to businesses.”
In their last Series A funding, Lookup raised has $2.5 million from Vinod Khosla’s personal fund Khosla Impact which also saw participation from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Global Founders Capital, the European investment fund from Rocket Internet’s Samwer brothers. Other participants include Geneva based ACE & Company, Singapore based M&S partners, New Look fashion chain founder Tom Singh and Lookout founder Kevin Mahaffey.
“This funding will be used for adding more merchants to our platform, scaling up the technology and growing our team. Our current focus is to build more relevant features in the Lookup Biz App. This will empower SMBs to manage their stores online with one tap access to payment, logistics and more importantly, our hyper-local ad network,” said Ravindran.
