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Social ecommerce platform DealShare, which raised $144 million in July 2021, has strengthened its senior leadership for the next stage of growth, Vineet Rao, Co-founder and CEO of DealShare, told YourStory on Thursday.

The company expects to clock annualised GMV (gross merchandising value) of $700 million in December 2021, which will be 15 times DealShare’s GMV a year before, Vineet said.

In the past three months, DealShare has made five lateral hires, including Ratul Ghosh as Chief Growth Officer of DealShare. Ratul was previously the Head of Rider Operations for India and South Asia at Uber.

The other senior management hires include Shivakumar L R as Chief Merchandising Officer, Hemant Sood as Head of Owned and Contract Manufacturing, Ashley D’Souza as Head of Offline Businesses, Anurag Laddha as Head of Engineering, and Roy Thomas as Head of General Merchandise.

In January this year, DealShare hired ex-Amazon and Myntra leader Manish Garg as Chief Strategy Officer,

and Anurag Laddha from Flipkart a couple of months later.

Shivakumar is a Walmart India veteran, who was with Spencer’s Retail before joining DealShare. Hemant Sood was previously Director – Value and Supply Chain at Raymond Consumer Care.

Ashley D’Souza was previously heading Sales and Marketing at Amazon Distribution (Kirana B2B), and Roy Thomas has had leadership roles at both Amazon and Flipkart.

“We built the plan for senior leadership hiring in June this year,” Vineet said. “On the operations side, we have seen a huge surge in demand,” said Vineet.

“As we started scaling tech, ops, sourcing and partnerships, we had to fast-track plans to hire senior management, which is a time-consuming process,” he added.

DealShare was founded in Jaipur by Vineet, Sourjyendu Medda, Sankar Bora, and Rajat Shikhar in 2018. Its headquarters is now in Bengaluru, and the company’s headcount has crossed 1,400 people.

Its social ecommerce app curates a local list of suppliers of groceries, snacks and drinks, personal care and cleaning products — and then incentivises group buying.

It has 6 million consumers, two-thirds of whom have purchased on DealShare for the first time in the past 12 months. The average order value is currently between Rs 700 and Rs 800.

“We do social demand aggregation,” Sourjyendu said.

“We have lots of WhatsApp groups, sharing on the app, and referral programmes to create consumer-level virality. Consumers bring in more consumers. Demand aggregation happens through social commerce modes,” he explained.

The company runs 70 warehouses to cope with demand in 20 cities that have a population exceeding 5 lakh each. The fulfilment or delivery in these cities is carried out by a network of 1,400 micro-entrepreneurs who get a delivery fee.

In 40 smaller cities that have a population of less than 5 lakh each, DealShare has a network of micro-entrepreneurs responsible for warehousing and last-mile delivery.

“We saw demand double during the COVID-19 pandemic-induced curbs, but could not fulfil adequately,” Sourjyendu said. “But coming out of the second wave, fulfilment and demand levels have both doubled.“

Each state has at least 2,000 stock keeping units (SKUs), sourced from local manufacturers and farmers among other suppliers, he added.

DealShare raised $144 million in a Series D round led by Tiger Global, with WestBridge Capital, Alpha Wave Incubation, and Z3 Partners, apart from existing investors.