Kartrocket, an e-commerce platform for SMEs and retailers, has raised $6 million led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), with participation from existing investors, Nirvana Digital India Fund, Nirvana Digital Investment, 500 Start-Ups and Singapore-based Beenext. Kartrocket will use the funding for product and seller ecosystem development, hiring and marketing. In October 2014, Kartrocket raised close to $2 million in a Series A round of investment led by Nirvana Venture Advisors, with participation from Beenos and 500 Startups. In July 2013, it had raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a seed round. In a press statement, Saahil Goel, CEO & co-founder of KartRocket said, “The current eco-system is not supportive of integrating smaller sellers into e-commerce; in-fact they aim towards replacing them rather than including them. Kraftly has a single vision of allowing every seller to participate in e-commerce.” In August last year, BigFoot Retail, which owns Kartrocket, launched Kraftly, an online consumer-to-consumer marketplace for handcrafted products. Kraftly enabled any individual, hobby seller or shop owner to create their own branded micro-shop, list products and receive payments. Sellers could also sell directly to their contacts from the app through Whatsapp and collect payments. Kartrocket charged a 5% commission on orders received through Kraftly. Kraftly would manage payments and logistics for each seller and allow the long tail of small and home sellers to go online. At that time, the platform had 1,500 category leaf nodes and over 600,000 products from 2,000 sellers. Then Goel said by February 2016 (the company updated…
