History
ShopClues was founded in 2011 by three people who had worked together in the United States: Sanjay Sethi, who had been with eBay, Sandeep Aggarwal, a former internet analyst at Caris and Company and Collins Stewart, and Radhika Aggarwal. The registered entity was Clues Network Private Limited, and the marketplace opened in Gurgaon with a catalogue that deliberately avoided the branded categories its larger rivals were fighting over.[1][8]
In March 2013 the company raised about 10 million dollars in a round led by Helion Venture Partners with Nexus Venture Partners and the Japanese group Netprice.com. Four months later, in July 2013, Sandeep Aggarwal was arrested in San Jose by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of passing inside information to a hedge fund executive about a possible Microsoft and Yahoo deal in 2009, when he worked for Collins Stewart Wealth Management.[8]
He was its chief executive at the time, and the company lost him at the moment it needed capital most. He pleaded guilty in the United States case, resigned from operations, and the investors considered bringing in an outside chief executive before Sanjay Sethi and Radhika Aggarwal took charge. Sethi ran the product and technology side, and Aggarwal, as chief business officer, ran merchants and business development.[8][14]
The next five years were the company's growth years. It raised a 100 million dollar round led by Tiger Global in January 2016 that took it past a billion dollars of valuation, acquired Momoe, added the AdZone advertising business, and pushed into rural distribution through partnerships with assisted commerce companies such as StoreKing and Payworld, whose franchisees in kirana stores and mobile recharge shops sold to walk in customers who had never used a shopping application.[1][4][7]
In 2017 the story turned. The company's founder filed a defamation case against his former wife and his former partner, the board backed the sitting executives, and the reporting that followed focused on resignations, an abandoned listing plan and the search for a buyer. What had been one of the youngest Indian unicorns became a company that could not raise fresh money.[9][14]
The company's own account of its early years was more confident. Business Today ranked it first among five-year-old startups in its 2015 coolest startups list, and the profile that came with the ranking described a business that was not worried about the cash wall its rivals had built, on the theory that Indian e-commerce would diverge into niches and each company would have to differentiate. A conversion ratio of about 4 per cent on its own traffic was cited at the time as evidence that its buyers were converting better than the browsers on bigger platforms.[3][6]
