• Abstract: arzooo plans to raise and use the funds to grow its business in the $65-billion category.

Business-to-business (B2B) retail technology platform Arzooo, has raised $70 million in a Series B round of funding led by an arm of Japan’s SBI Group, SBI Investment, and trifecta leader’s fund. Tony Xu, the founder of doordash, a US-based online food ordering, and food delivery platform is also one of the investors in the current round, making Arzoo his first India investment.

Japan’s SBI Holdings, Trifecta Leaders Funds, and existing investors, including Celesta Capital and 3 Lines VC are in an all-equity deal with Arzoo.

“While the last decade has been about the proliferation of new-age economies, (the) internet was still seen as a rival to offline retail. The retailer community has been at the receiving end for a while,” said Arzooo’s cofounder and CEO Khushnud Khan. “Today, technology is making inroads into brick-and-mortar shops and we are excited to be at the forefront of this revolution” he added.

In 2018, former Flipkart employees Rishi Raj Rathore and Khushnud Khan founded a startup that offers physical retail stores access to a wide range of inventory, enabling them to compete more effectively with online marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart.

“Arzooo’s business model is very capital-efficient and can meet the increasingly diversified requirement of retail shops and end customers,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, chairman and president, of SBI Holdings. “It is also great for them to have built a self-branded functional logistics system that is crucial to their business. There is no limit to the company’s future, and we would like to fully support them.”

Khan believes his firm is eliminating the barrier of size, scale, and capital for medium and small stores while democratizing retail in India.

It is claimed that a $65 billion market within this category is the firm’s target market for investing in technology and scaling its business.