In January this year, Wydr secured an undisclosed amount in Series A investment from Stellaris Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jungle Ventures

Wydr.in, an online wholesale marketplace connecting retailers and manufacturers, is in talks with multiple investors to raise Series B round of funding, a top executive of the Gurgaon-based startup told e27. 

Wydr — which in January this year secured an undisclosed amount in Series A investment from Stellaris Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Jungle Ventures — will use the funds being raised to scale operations and develop new features.

Also Read: Sowing the seed of entrepreneurship: Jungle Ventures teams up with leading VCs to launch a seed fund

“We will be raising our next round of funding in the coming months. The capital will be utilised to consolidate our leadership position in the market with focus on deeper penetration amongst manufacturers and building more innovative platform features for our B2B audience,” Wydr Founder and CEO Devesh Rai said, without divulging details.

The company was launched in March 2016 with a round of seed funding from Sandeep Aggarwal, Co-founder of ShopClues and Droom.

Wydr is a mobile marketplace that brings brands, wholesalers, importers and retailers on a single platform to make wholesale buying and selling more organised. It offers end-to-end services, from technology to marketing, logistics, customer care and billing & payment for wholesale buyers and sellers in India. The marketplace deals in products across categories like IT, mobile, electronics, fashion, home, and automotive.

The buyers and retailers on the platform have multiple sourcing options, real-time new products, price discovery and rendering wholesale hubs. Some of the brands doing business on Wydr include Milton, Bombay Dyeing, Cortina, Masper, Princeware, Oriflame, Strontium, Triveni Sarees, Indian Women Fashion, Vishal Prints, Belle Fille, CallMate, Padmini Impex, Nova, Ambrane India Pvt. Ltd., HiTech, Vox, IKall.

According to Rai, Wydr has a first-mover advantage in India, and so has been able to gain the trust of wholesalers and retailers over the past year. As of today, the marketplace has 700,000 retailers and 7,500 wholesalers and manufacturers on its platform. With a catalogue size of over 700,000 products, Wydr caters to over 16,000 PIN codes and delivers orders in over 4,200 cities and towns.

Salient features

The company provides a host of features, such as:

• MyNet to assist wholesalers, importers and brands to build networks, conduct chats, negotiate and finalise deals with buyers.
• Custom chat tool for buyers to communicate with the sellers directly, negotiate terms and fix deals instantly. Direct realtime chat functionality also helps the retailers as well as wholesalers to build long term business relations.
• Big Data systems for analysing click stream data and personalising user experience: When retailers visit the Wydr app, they find products that are related to their business. These suggestions are made based on the purchases they have made recently or the products they have looked for.
• Public as well as private marketplace for sellers: Sellers on Wydr can keep their catalog private; else, they can also keep their catalogs open for public viewing, depending on their preferences.
• Assortment: Sellers often sell products in assorted sets, especially in case of products in the categories of fashion, furnishing and footwear. Wydr offers its buyers the facility to build their own assortment to meet the minimum order quantity. Wydr is the first among the B2B e-commerce platforms to offer such a facility to its users.
• Team functionality: For sellers, it may not always be possible to operate the account by themselves. They may have employees/partners who would need to access the account to operate business on the app. To cater to this need of the sellers, Wydr has introduced ‘Team Functionality’ which enables multiple users authorized by the registered account-holder to operate from the same account.

Also Read: 5 challenges to overcome in developing a B2B marketplace

Wydr earn money through transactional as well as non-transactional revenue channels. Transactional revenue is primarily through orders placed on marketplace, while non-transactional revenues streams include monthly virtual exhibitions for different categories, ads and sponsored listings by brands, premium features and services, catalog services, private marketplace mode, preferred listing, and qualified lead generation through live query feeds.

As of now, e-commerce marketplaces are only concentrated on B2C rather than B2B. Wydr sees opportunities in US$300-billion market, which is projected to grow to US$700 billion by 2020, given a CAGR of 15 per cent. It comprises over one million sellers and 14 million retailers.

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